


a different word for bad luck

by iguessyouregonnamissthepantyraid



Category: Jessica Jones (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alcohol, Angst with a Happy Ending, But He's LITERALLY a Magic Alien So Sue Me, Excessive Swearing, Fix-It of Sorts, Gen, Graphic Depiction of Neck Injury, Hopeful Ending, Humor, Hurt/Comfort, Inevitably Will Be Jossed By Endgame But The Author DOESN'T CARE, Medical Inaccuracies, Not Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Compliant, POV Claire Temple, POV Jessica Jones, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Questionable Interpretations of How Loki's Magic Works, Very Excessive Swearing, Whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-26
Updated: 2019-06-13
Packaged: 2019-09-28 01:57:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 33,154
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17173658
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iguessyouregonnamissthepantyraid/pseuds/iguessyouregonnamissthepantyraid
Summary: Once again, death fails to stick to the God of Mischief.As for Claire Temple, apparently even half an apocalypse isn't enough to prevent her from stumbling over another super-powered person that's been beaten half to hell and needs her help. This is starting to become a thing for her, isn't it?Still. At least last time it wasn't a damnterrorist.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> "but don't you ever get tired of throwing loki at characters he'd never interact with in canon??" no. never. guess i've found my niche, folks.
> 
> this is gonna be a short fic, ~30k. i'm gonna go ahead on record and say it will not include any speculation on how the avengers are actually gonna defeat thanos, and as such, it definitely qualifies as a "hopeful ending" rather than a "happy" one
> 
> disclaimer: there’s a few lines in spanish, but the meaning should be more-or-less clear. that being said, i’m by no means fluent, so if i made a mistake please drop a comment and let me know!

_Maybe God is just a cop that we can fast talk_  
 _So if you’re guilty and you know it, put your hands up_  
_'Cause karma’s just a different word for bad luck_  
_And what if death is just another pair of handcuffs?_

_Well then we’d better run  
Then we’d better run_

_\- Fast Talk,_ Houses

 

———

 

 

The sound is like a damn _warhead_ exploding right outside her window.

Her whole apartment building seems to shake after the bomb goes off, and Claire takes a second to make sure she keeps her feet even as a curse rips itself out of her throat and her heart hammers away at a mile a minute. A few car alarms go off. A cat screeches loud and high. She can already smell asphalt burning.

And she’s not sure why, but she doesn’t even spare a thought for leaving it be or letting someone else handle it. She doesn’t even change or throw on a jacket; she’s out the door in half a second, sprinting down the stairs in her pajama shorts and tank top and socks.

The stench gets ten times worse the second she’s cleared the outer door.

It’s quiet out here, though, way quieter than she expected it to be after an explosion that crazy just went off. Quieter even than the whole city’s been since— well, since everything. Even if it is two in the morning. _Especially_ if it's two in the morning. The car alarms have all been silenced. And her neighbors, those neighbors that are still left, they’re—

Her neighbors aren’t out here. None of them.

There’s black smoke billowing up from the alleyway beside her apartment from an explosion that shook the whole damn neighborhood by the sound of it, and _she’s the only person out here._

How in the hell—?

Wait.

No, okay, she’s not _quite_ the only person out here. As she hugs her arms over her chest and inches her way toward the alley, she sees a silhouette through the smoke, the dim shape of a person staggering away from the site of the explosion and out into the street.

Once the person gets a bit closer, she realizes she knows him, or she recognizes him, anyway. He’s one of the younger guys, late teens or early twenties, that lives two floors down from her in either 2B or maybe 2C. She can’t remember which, and she doesn’t know his name either.

So that’s _one_ of her neighbors, at least, who came out here to investigate.

But still. How in the hell is it just the two of them?

He spots her a second later, and he actually seems to wilt with relief at the sight of her.

 _“U—una persona,”_ he rushes to explain, breathless, gesturing wildly behind him. _“Al principio pensé que era un meteoro, pero—”_

 _“_ _¿_ _Una persona?”_ she asks, raising an eyebrow. It wasn’t a bomb? It was a person? _“_ _¿_ _E_ _stá seguro?”_

_“Sí, sí—”_

He spins around, ready to go back into the alley, and with one hand he gestures for her to follow behind him. With the other hand, he pulls the collar of his shirt up over his mouth and nose. As they make their way through the thick, black smoke—it’s asphalt, she realizes a second later, powdered asphalt, not just smoke—he keeps talking, his voice muffled by his hand clamped over his shirt over his mouth.

Something about the person, a man, who fell into the alley like a _meteor._

And what, exactly, does it say about Claire’s life that a man falling from the sky like a meteor is not actually that far out of the realm of possibility?

… Well, she thinks as they step into the alley, it sure _looks_ like a bomb went off.

The whole damn place is demolished. The two dumpsters are a pair of crumpled, barely recognizable heaps of metal. The walls on either side are missing a few bricks, and the wall on the right, the one belonging to Claire’s apartment complex, bears a deep fissure in the stone from the ground all the way up to the third floor. She and her neighbor stand at the edge of a crater, an honest-to-God _crater,_ where the ground between the two apartment complexes used to be.

At the bottom of the crater is a man, unconscious and definitely very, _very_ hurt.

And Claire knows him.

She’s never seen him before, not in person, but that is definitely—

“Oh,” is all she can say at first. Then, _“Fuck.”_

She’s frozen, shock keeping her feet rooted to the ground. Her neighbor must not recognize the body lying at the bottom of the crater, he _can’t_ have recognized him, there’s no way he did, because otherwise he wouldn’t have described him as just a _person_ but as _the same goddamn alien who wiped out half of Manhattan during the Incident_ —

Totally oblivious to Claire’s momentary crisis, apparently, her neighbor carefully makes his way down into the crater, his sneakers skidding against the dirt and rocks, until he reaches the body and kneels down beside it.

Eventually, her legs feeling like jelly, Claire follows behind. She ignores the heat and the jagged ground pressing through her socks, slips down into the crater, and gradually sinks to a crouch at the body’s other side.

 _“¿Está vivo?”_ she asks, even though she thinks she already knows the answer.

Her neighbor nods, bypassing the body’s neck entirely — and for good reason, Claire thinks, eyeing down the ugly purple bruise that seems to reach from beneath the high collar of the alien’s outfit all the way up past his jawline — and grabbing him gently by the wrist instead. _“Tiene pulso.”_

“Holy shit,” she breathes, covering her mouth.

She takes a second to really look the guy over. He’s unconscious, that much is a definite. The bruising on his neck isn’t just bruising — his neck is _broken,_ the muscles all along his throat swollen so badly it almost looks fake, dark veins playing across his jaw and creeping up one cheek.

His chest is rising and falling, barely, and so slowly that Claire almost thinks it’s not moving at all. But it is moving, he’s _breathing,_ and just how in the hell is that possible? How in the hell is he still _alive?_ She knows he’s supposed to be some kind of superpowered alien, or even a kind of God, like Thor, but… Yeah, sure, Thor could probably have survived a fall like the one this guy seems to have just been through, from what she’s heard of him.

But a _snapped neck?_

Her first thought, her first _insane_ thought, is that they need to get him out of here. Someone else will show up any second now, and then there’ll be first responders, and police, and probably firemen, and anyone who was a first responder during the Incident is bound to take one look at this guy and decide that half-dead isn’t dead enough. Not for him.

But is that even a bad thing? _Shouldn’t_ that be their response to something like this, before he wakes up and heals and tries to go for The Incident: Round Two? Hasn’t the city — or the whole damn world for that matter — had enough major catastrophes in the last twenty-hour hours? Do they really need to tempt another?

Claire gulps, staring down at the body.

She doesn’t have her phone. It’s all the way up in her apartment.

She should tell her neighbor to call 911. They should get the police here. They should get the damn _Avengers_ here, or… or whatever's left of them, anyway.

 _“Ayúdame a moverlo,”_ she says instead, reaching for the body’s shoulder. Every instinct she has is screaming at her not to move him, not when he’s got a broken neck and any slight movement could tip him over the edge into _actually_ dying, but… Shit, if he can survive crashing into the ground like a damn meteor _while_ he’s got a broken neck, then he can survive being moved. Probably.

And if he can’t, then… whatever. Fuck. At least she tried.

But the body doesn’t budge. She gets one hand under the back of his head, grasps his shoulder with the other, and he’s—

Holy shit, he’s _ridiculously_ heavy. He looks no more than, what, one-eighty? Maybe one-ninety? But he might as well weigh a ton. She tries being gentle at first, then _heaves_ with everything she’s got, and she can see from the look on her neighbor’s face that he’s having the exact same problem.

Claire rocks back on her heels, pulls a hand through her hair, and runs through a mental list of options. She can’t move the guy somewhere safer. She and her neighbor together can’t move him at all.

They might be running short on time. She’s shocked no one else has turned up already.

_… Oh, screw it._

She asks her neighbor for his phone, and he obliges, looking every bit as lost and confused as Claire feels. She opens up his web browser, searches the number, and calls it before she can think to change her mind.

It rings, and rings, and rings, and rings. By the sixth ring Claire’s heart begins to sink for an entirely new reason. Shit. _Shit._ Maybe no one will answer. She doesn’t know for sure if there’s anyone on the other end of the line _to_ answer. In the chaos after— _after,_ she never thought to check. She was too focused on others, too relieved that her mamá and some of her old coworkers and friends all answered the phone, too sick with worry when Luke never did, when Colleen was nowhere to be found.

It goes to voicemail. She curses, hangs up, dials it again.

_Come on. Come on. Please._

This time it rings twice, and then—

“Hello,” the voice answers, exhausted and angry. “I have a voicemail for a reason, and if—”

“I need your help,” Claire cuts in. “I need your help _right now.”_

There’s a pause.

“… Claire? That you?”

“Yeah. Yeah, it’s me. How soon can you get to my apartment?”

“It’s—” the voice cuts off, there's the sound of fumbling. Something hits the floor with a _clunk_ and a muttered curse. “It’s two in the goddamn morning. You know that, right?”

“I know.”

Again there’s a pause, a few seconds of silence followed by some barely muffled grumbling, and then, “Still in Hell’s Kitchen?”

“Yeah. Same place.”

There’s a sigh that comes out more like a groan.

“Jessica—”

“Yeah, no, I’m coming. Shit. Uh, yeah. Definitely coming. Just… Is this, like, an _emergency_ emergency?”

Claire gulps, glances at the alien’s horribly swollen, purple-and-black throat, and then she looks toward the street. Still no red and blue lights. No voices out here other than her own.

But it’s got to be only a matter of time.

“Yeah,” she answers. “Yeah, I think it is.”

“Shit,” Jessica says again. “Okay. Yeah. Fine. Five minutes.”

 

* * *

 

Somehow, no one shows up in the time it takes for Jessica to get there. Somehow. And Claire’s not sure whether to be relieved, or confused, or annoyed by that.

Still, whatever the reason, Jessica is the first person to appear in the alley after Claire hangs up. She’s the _only_ person to step into the alley aside from Claire and her neighbor — whose name, she’s gathered by now, is Roberto — and when she does, Claire watches as she steps up to the edge of the crater, flapping one hand in front of her face, scowling at the smoke.

But as soon as she glances toward the bottom of the crater, she freezes stock still with her boots poised at the very edge, arms tense at her sides. The scowl falls away. Her eyes go wide.

“Thanks for coming,” Claire says. “We—”

“What,” Jessica cuts her off, apparently unable to tear her eyes away from the body. “The _fuck._ Is that.”

“It’s—”

“Claire,” Jessica says, eyes unwavering on the body. “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but _please_ tell me that’s a dead guy in a _fucked_ up realistic cosplay.” She closes her eyes for a second, screws them shut as she clenches her fists, then opens her eyes and looks up, like she needs to look at anything other than the scene in front of her. _“Please_ tell me you killed a guy at Comic Con and then called me here to help bury the body. Please.”

Rather than answer with the obvious, _no, he's definitely the real deal,_ Claire cringes, glancing across the body at Roberto, and decides to go with the less obvious point instead.

“He’s… not dead.”

Jessica lowers her gaze back down, finally leveling Claire with—

—not a glare. Which is… unexpected.

Jessica doesn’t look angry. She looks _frightened._

“Claire, I can’t,” she say, shaking her head, her voice low. “I can’t kill him for you.”

Claire blinks. “What—? No, that’s not—” she cuts herself off, shakes her head. “Jesus, you think I called you here to _kill_ a guy for me?”

“Wait, what?” Jessica asks, all traces of nervousness gone from her voice as it returns to its usual crass volume, her brow creased. In a split second her face has gone from anxious to—well, looking at Claire like she’s grown a second head. “Why the hell not? You know who this guy is, right?”

“Yeah,” she answers. “I do. And he’s not dead, but he’s damn close. I need to get him out of this crater so I can take a look at his injuries, but he’s… heavier than he looks. Like, way heavier.”

Jessica pauses for a beat. “So we’re just gonna breeze right past the whole demolishing Midtown thing, huh?”

Claire glances across the alien’s body again, looking to Roberto as she hesitates. Roberto is looking between the two of them, chewing on his cheek. He still has yet to recognize the body between them, or at least he has yet to _indicate_ that he has, and Claire hasn’t asked. Either way, it’s… one less complication. And Claire feels pretty justified counting her blessings at a time like this.

She looks back at Jessica and says, truthfully, “Enough people have died, Jess.”

“Yeah, no shit,” she fires back. “And you think _him_ showing up a day later is, what, a coincidence? It could have been his fault for all we know.”

Claire runs a hand over her face, huffs a breath.

Yeah. That had occurred to her.

But she doesn’t think so. Maybe it says something about the state her mind’s been in. Maybe it’s just because her entire world’s been rocked down to its core —  _everyone’s_ world has — and she hasn’t been able to do a damn thing about it, hasn’t been able to _help,_ and now there’s something right in front of her that she _can_ do something about.

“Are you gonna help or not?” she finally asks.

Jessica blows out a breath, puffing out her cheeks, and she raises her hands as if to say, _What the hell else am I gonna do?_

Then she hops down into the crater, slowly letting her boots slide down to the bottom.

 _“Es mi amiga,”_ Claire tells Roberto by way of introduction, now that it’s clear Jessica isn’t about to turn tail and run off.

“Yeah,” Jessica says, her voice weak as she stands over the body. “A friend. Only one left that can lift a small building, I guess.” And damn it, Claire’s heart skips for half a second there, because she thinks Jess is about to bring up Luke, that she’s about to confirm for her that the radio silence from him is for the exact reason she’s been fearing. But she doesn’t. Instead Jessica carefully steps around them all until she’s just over the body’s head, and she cringes, looking down her nose at him. “Shit. How is this guy still alive?”

Claire shakes her head. She doesn't know, either.

“I mean, I know he's supposed to be Thor's brother and all,” Jessica says, crouching down to get a closer look, “but _shit.”_

Her gloved hands reach toward him, fingers trembling just a bit, but she doesn't touch him. Her fingertips hover just over the bruising on his cheek, on his neck, before she draws back.

“See if you can move him,” Claire says.

Jessica shoots her a confused look. “You sure _that_ won't kill him?”

“No,” Claire admits with a shrug. “But we gotta get him somewhere else.”

After a second of hesitation, Jessica sets her jaw and wriggles one hand underneath his head, down near the base of his skull. She wedges her other hand beneath his shoulder. She takes a breath, and then—

Then a bright green glow takes over the body, from the tip of the guy's head all the way down to his toes, and that’s all the warning they get before Jessica is sent _hurtling_ out of the crater with a startled shout, like she’s just been thrown by an invisible catapult.

“Jessica?!”

_“¿Está bien?”_

“I'm— _shit,_ I’m fine,” she calls out from where they can't see. A few seconds later she stumbles back into view, dirt and soot coating her face, her hair blown all around her. “I'm fine,” she repeats, and then she glares down at the still very unconscious body and adds, “Seriously? I'm trying to help you, you stupid dick.”

Claire blinks. “You think he did that?”

“Well we sure as hell didn't,” Jessica says with a huff, shaking out her hands like they've been burned, and she makes her way back down into the crater. “He is heavy, though. You weren't kidding. Okay, uh… You,” she says, gesturing vaguely at Claire's neighbor.

“Roberto,” he says.

“Right, yeah. Roberto,” Jessica says. And, pointing, she says, “You get his right leg. Claire, you get his left. Both of you _wait until I say so,_ and you help me lift him. Slowly. I'll get most of his weight and try to keep his neck from being moved, but we gotta be gentle so he doesn't fucking _Jedi_ me into the sky again.”

Roberto seems to have gotten the gist without a translation, and he lowers himself into position just as Jessica does. Claire follows suit, crouching down on the body’s left side.

“Okay,” Jessica says. “Slowly. Very, very slowly. On my count. One.”

Claire gets one hand beneath the guy's calf, the other under his thigh. She watches as Roberto does the same.

“Two.”

Jessica wriggles one entire arm underneath the body's upper back this time, and with a brief disgusted look at the alien’s throat, her nose wrinkling, she spreads the other hand wide over the back of his head.

_“Three.”_


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you to everyone who left feedback! i'm so glad people are enjoying reading this, since i've definitely been enjoying writing it
> 
> this is a jessica POV chapter, and for those of you unfamiliar with her character, she's definitely the reason for the "excessive swearing" and "alcohol" tags on this story, fair warning

Jess has no fucking clue how she got roped into this mess.

No, actually, wait. Yes, she does. Because her luck is absolute garbage, for one. Because Claire attracts superpowered assholes in need like it's a damn curse. Because for some reason Asgardians weigh a metric fucking _ton,_ and because Claire has exactly two people in her contact list that are capable of moving something that heavy.

Or, well. She _did_ have two. Until yesterday.

Jess… doesn’t want to think about that. She doesn’t want to think about the fact that the world’s gone to shit, about how half the people she knows are probably gone but she’ll never actually _know_ if they are. She doesn’t want to think about the unread voicemails from Malcolm, and from fucking _Dorothy_ of all people, or the texts begging to know if she’s alright. She doesn’t want to think about the fact that Trish hasn’t called.

Eighteen hours ago she stepped into Oscar’s apartment to find nothing but a pile of dust by the couch. There were screams and shouts outside as the same thing happened to hundreds more all over — _billions,_ as she’d come to find a few hours later.

And Jessica’s brain pretty much shut right goddamned down after that.

Really, she should be glad for the distraction. It seems like Claire is. The kid, Roberto, he is. Something to do, somebody to help, even if that _somebody_ happens to be the dude that brought on the first round of mass casualties to the city six years ago.

Guess causing the deaths of hundreds of people kind of pales in comparison, now.

And just how fucked up is _that?_

Jessica shakes the thought away, hands stuffed into her pockets as she passes the first liquor store on Claire’s street. It’s closed, obviously, given that it’s three in the morning now, and whoever runs the place might not be around anymore to keep it open at normal hours anyway.

She breaks the lock. Grabs two handles of whiskey off the nearest shelf, pauses, thinks, and grabs a third. Stuffs all three, plus a few snacks, into a bag from behind the counter. Leaves a couple extra twenties pinned beneath the register to make up for the whole breaking-and-entering thing. Assuming anyone will be here in the morning to find it.

The walk was supposed to help clear her head a bit. It doesn’t work.

By the time she returns to Claire’s apartment, Jessica steps in through the door and finds herself, _alone,_ in Claire’s living room, and the alien—

The alien is laid out on the couch right in front of her.

She does remember him, sort of. From the news. Except he was wide awake then, with shorter hair and what was probably an alien handheld W.M.D. in his hand, commanding a giant monster army, fighting the Avengers, destroying Midtown.

As one does, apparently.

One thing's for sure, though. The image of “super powerful alien terrorist” is a hell of a lot less intimidating when you just carried all several-hundred-pounds of him, unconscious, up three flights of stairs. He’s still out cold, still looks like he’s got one foot in the grave. The weird leathery get-up he’s wearing has a slice in it, a cut through the collar that opens it up like a quarter-zip sweater and exposes his collarbone — which is every bit as black and blue and _disgusting_ as his neck had been. But his neck is covered, now, by a folded maroon towel wrapped around it with a few dark blue ice packs poking out from beneath, the whole thing held in place with string.

Jessica is glad for that much, at least. It had been pretty fucking gross to look at. Like someone very, very big had grabbed a hold of his neck and _squeezed_ until the guy’s damn spine had snapped in half, and Jessica’s first thought when she saw him — after a long string of _what the fuck what the fuck what the actual fuck_ — was that he must have gotten himself on the wrong side of a fight against the big green guy.

Now that she's really looking, there’s a weird sort of glow to him now, too. Kind of like when he threw her thirty goddamn feet in the air earlier, but it’s way toned down now, to the point that she might even be imagining it. Maybe.

She shakes her head, turns, and makes her way into the kitchen.

Claire's neighbor is sitting at the kitchen table, nursing a steaming mug of coffee, and Claire herself is standing at the sink washing her hands. A massive first aid kit has been emptied out onto her kitchen counter, odds and ends haphazardly scattered all over. A roll of ace bandaging is half unraveled, a pair of shears beside it, all the normal things like Band-Aids and alcohol wipes discarded into a pile on the side. There’s a bunch of stuff Jessica doesn’t recognize, too, weird little instruments and tubes whose purpose she can’t even begin to guess.

Claire looks up at her, sees her staring nervously down at the veritable ambulance supply she’s got on the counter, and explains, “Airway kit. Just in case.”

Jess feels herself go pale, automatically picturing one of those little instruments stabbing through her neck so that a tube can be inserted into her trachea, like in the damn _movies_ — and she shakes her head. “Whatever,” she says, depositing her bag on the kitchen table. “Just warn me before you go poking holes in him.”

“Probably won’t have to,” Claire says. “At this rate I don’t even know if there’s anything else I can do for him.”

“Yeah?” Jess asks, digging her hand into the bag to pull out the first handle of whiskey. She doesn't really care all that much if this guy kicks the bucket, if she’s being honest. She’ll be a little pissed that she dragged him up all those stairs for no reason, sure, but that's about it.

“Yeah,” Claire answers with half a shrug. “It’s been less than an hour and the bruising’s already almost gone.”

… Wait.

Jess pauses halfway through uncapping the handle of whiskey, and she turns her wide eyes on Claire. _“What?”_

Claire shrugs again, like it’s no big deal that the alien terrorist on her couch is just bouncing back from a broken neck and a nosedive into asphalt at terminal fucking velocity. She asks, “You’re that surprised?”

“Uh, _kind_ of, yeah.”

“He is like Thor,” says Roberto in accented English, startling Jess out of her momentary panic. She blinks, shakes her head, and finds him looking up at the both of them with his coffee in one hand, his phone in the other.

“What—?” Claire starts to ask, apparently just as taken aback as Jess is. “You _knew_ that?”

 _“Sí_ _,”_ he answers, placing the phone face-up on the table and spinning it around so that both Jess and Claire can see it. There’s a few tabs open on his browser, but the one open on display is the Wikipedia article for Asgardians. Above that she can see the titles of a few other articles he’s been reading: there’s _Thor (mythology), Thor (Avenger),_ and _The Incident (disambiguation)._

On the _Asgardians_ page he’s got open, it shows a blurry picture of four people in some desert-looking place, all standing in the middle of the road like they don’t know how sidewalks work, dressed like they just came back from a Renaissance Fair. Beside the picture is a bulleted list of “Abilities” ranging from super speed to super strength to combat expertise to things like “telekinesis (unconfirmed)” and “flight (unconfirmed)”. Roberto taps a finger to the fourth bullet point, right between super speed and “electrokinesis (Thor only)”.

“Super healing,” Jess reads aloud.

“You’ve been busy,” Claire says, crossing her arms. “And you’re being really cool about that fact that there’s a supervillain on the couch in the other room.”

Roberto takes a sip of his coffee, apparently mulling that over, and for the first time, it occurs to Jessica to wonder how old Roberto would have been during the Incident. Twelve? Fourteen? The perfect age to think that a bunch of aliens and superheroes flying around the city was _super cool_ instead of absolutely terrifying, too young to have to worry about things like hospital bills and property damage and insurance hikes.

But then all she can picture is Oscar's kid, and it's like a hand reaches straight through her ribcage and grabs whatever it can and _twists._ She slams a wall down on that before it can get anywhere.

Roberto, pulling her back to the present, finally shrugs and says, “Well. He is not on _my_ couch.”

There’s a beat of silence, and Jess snorts, the closest thing to a laugh she’s had in about — well, about eighteen hours. “You’re kidding.”

 _“Sí_ _,”_ he says again, offering them both a soft smile. “But, ah, it is like you said,” he adds, gesturing toward Claire with his mug as his smile takes on a sad note, “Enough people have died. We do what we can to help.”

Shaking her head with a light smile, Claire wordlessly grabs the coffee pot and pours some more into his mug for him. “Alright, so he can heal fast. Anything else?”

“Uh— _s_ _í_ _, pero…”_ he answers. He leaves the phone where it is so they can see, clicking through a link to the article _Loki (mythology)_ and then from there to _Loki (Asgardian)_ before he finds the information he was looking for.

It doesn’t take long to see what he’s getting at.

“Died November 2013?” Claire reads aloud.

Roberto nods, then scrolls down to the bit of the article that explains that, and Jessica and Claire both lean in to read it over themselves.

According to the article, it was reported by someone who had contacts with the Avengers that Loki had died due to an incident “for which the details were unclear,” sometime in November of 2013. The only information released about it, apparently, was that Thor had confirmed it himself, giving an official statement to “U.S. authorities.”

“Well he’s definitely not dead,” Claire says.

Jessica leans back and finally finishes uncapping the handle of whiskey. “Yeah, no shit.”

“Should we, I don’t know, find some way to get in touch with Thor?” Claire asks, placing the pot of coffee back in the machine. “I mean — shit, do we even know if Thor’s still alive?”

Roberto shrugs. “His death has not been reported.”

“Yeah, well, that doesn’t really mean much,” Jess says, and she takes a swig from the handle. “News stations are still trying to figure out what the hell’s going on, they wouldn’t have reported on it yet either way.”

“The Avengers are probably gonna make a statement or something,” Claire offers. “Whatever’s left of them. Today was probably too crazy, but tomorrow” — she glances at the clock — “or, today, I guess. We should know then if Thor’s alive.”

“Yeah,” Jess says, “and until then, we got his half-dead, probably crazy, and definitely superpowered brother on your couch.”

She takes a few long gulps from the bottle, then lifts it in a mock toast.

“Here’s hoping he’s a whiskey guy.”

 

* * *

 

They spend another hour in the kitchen, and Thor’s half-dead brother doesn’t wake up.

Roberto goes down to his own apartment to get some sleep. Jess sticks around. She and Claire take turns watching the couch.

Claire, probably, watches him because she doesn’t want her new patient to run off and get himself killed after she went through all that trouble to keep him from dying. And as for Jess — well, it occurred to her around Hour Three that if they do find some way to get in contact with the Avengers, or if this guy has some way to get in contact with them, that’ll be the closest thing any of them get to a real explanation for what the _hell_ happened yesterday, what the hell happened to Oscar and Luke and probably Trish and maybe Vido.

If anyone knows what happened, it’ll be those alien-fighting assholes.

And Loki himself might even know; Jess hasn’t ruled out the idea that he might have caused it in the first place.

… Which is why, when she’s dozing off in Claire’s armchair and hears a vague sort of wheeze come from the direction of the couch, she shoots awake with her heart already thudding like a jackhammer against her ribs, and she lurches to her feet. She's tense as load-bearing wire, fists tight at her sides.

Claire hears it. She hears Jess jumping off the armchair, or Loki’s rasping, whichever, but she comes sprinting out of the kitchen with her fourth or fifth cup of coffee sloshing around in one hand, already asking, “What is it?”

Jess doesn’t need to answer.

Both of them openly stare as the Asgardian on Claire’s couch struggles for breath, fingers twitching, chest heaving, and for the first time since they found him in that crater three or four hours ago, his eyes open. They’re so rimmed in red that even his damn irises seem red, and he doesn’t seem to actually _see_ anything.

His eyes frantically search the ceiling, looking without seeing, and then—

“Jess, _grab him.”_

The urgency in Claire’s voice banishes any thought of asking why, and in any case, she realizes why a second later. He’s lifting one arm, trying to reach for his neck, and Jess hurdles over the coffee table to stop him before he can. Her hand clamps down on his forearm, holding it in place, gripping tight enough that it’d snap his radius and ulna if he were human.

But he’s _not_ human, and he only stops moving for half a second — surprised, maybe, that she was able to get a hold on him at all — and then for the second time in fucking _four hours,_ her entire field of vision is blotted out by an eye-searing green light.

Her back hits Claire’s wall before she even registers that it’s happened.

 _“Shit,”_ she hisses, scrambling to her feet, and she rushes right back toward him before Claire can even think about intervening. This dude’s a hell of a lot stronger than Jess is, which means he could probably end Claire’s entire _existence_ with, like, a thought, or something.

Once she’s gotten herself between him and Claire, Jess slows up, approaching him with her hands up in obvious surrender.

A wayward strand of hair's fallen in front of her face. She ignores it.

“Hey, dickhead, relax,” she says, breathless, ununciating a bit more than is probably strictly necessary. “We’re friendlies.”

Claire, luckily, stays out of it for the time being. Jessica keeps her eyes on Loki, though she shifts a bit to place herself a little more firmly between him and Claire. Just in case.

Given what she’s heard of Thor and the company he tends to keep, it _kind_ of makes her feel like a brick wall standing against a nuclear warhead.

Still. Whatever.

His eyes seem a little less red, now. He definitely popped a vessel in the left one, but the right almost looks greenish. Maybe gray. The whites of his eyes are still red, though, and tears are building up in them, which Jess figures is a given since he’s literally skirting on the edge of choking to death every time he takes in one of those shaky, rattling breaths.

Again he lifts his arm, and this time, Jess doesn’t move a muscle. Instead she just says, “I wouldn’t do that.”

He pauses, face contorting in pain for a second, and he completely ignores what she's said. Predictably. He prods gingerly at the towel, then hooks a finger through the string holding it in place, snapping it with barely a twitch. The towel and the two spent ice packs drop away, one of the packs falling from the couch to land with a _thunk_ on the floor.

His throat is still swollen, splotches of bruising mottling his skin from below his collarbone all the way up to his right cheek, though it’s faded a ton since Jess last saw it. Yellows and greens dominate where black and purple used to. One vein still stands out, dark and ugly against the pale skin below his jawline.

More of that crazy green light gathers in his palm. Jess tenses every muscle, preparing to be shot across the room again.

But he doesn’t attack either of them. Instead, he lowers his hand against his own throat, and that green light shifts and churns like it’s _alive,_ gathering around his neck and then seeping into his skin, slowly, bit by bit until it disappears completely. His breathing evens out. It still sounds like it rattles in his chest, still sounds like it causes him an absolute shit load of pain, but it evens out. He stops acting like he’s actively dying.

His eyes drift shut as he drops his arm back onto the couch.

There’s a few seconds in which Claire and Jess both just stand there, waiting, and Jess actually starts to wonder if he’s knocked himself right out again.

But then, he speaks. He takes in a breath that makes Jess wince from the sound of it, and then without opening his eyes he rasps a barely audible, “Wh… whe…?”

Jess answers, “Hell's Kitchen.”

His brow creases.

“New York,” Claire offers. “Earth.”

Something that might be nervousness flits across his features, and he opens his eyes to look at Jess.

“Relax,” she tells him again, because she’s pretty sure she knows why he has that look on his face. “If we were gonna hurt you we would have had plenty of time do it earlier.”

He frowns — or, frowns _more,_ anyway. A syllable makes it halfway up his throat and then seems to catch on his Adam’s apple, an aborted, painful sound that was either going to become the word _it_ or _is,_ but Jess can’t make out which.

He clenches his fist, tries to reach up for his throat again, but apparently he spent everything he had on that first round of magic voodoo weirdness. His hand falls open and palm-up on the couch by his side, a few green sparks fizzling to nothing at his fingertips, and his eyes close again. His chest visibly trembles as he tries to keep breathing.

“Relax,” Claire tells him. “And stop trying to talk, okay? You heal pretty fast, but you still got a ways to go.”

“Yeah,” Jess agrees, now that she’s more-or-less certain that he isn’t about to go ballistic and kill both of them. If he even _could,_ in the state he’s in now. “You’re safe here, we’re not gonna hurt you. Just, you know, stop throwing me around at walls, or someone’s gonna start asking tough questions and figure out you’re here.”

They’re probably already wondering what caused that massive crater in the alleyway next door, she thinks, but it’s not worth pointing out. Everyone around here — or, actually, everyone around  _anywhere_ — has bigger issues right now. No one’s gonna come knocking any time soon. They’ll be fine. Probably.

Loki still doesn’t open his eyes, but he does try to speak again.

“Th—” he tries, winces, and tries again. “… Thanos—”

And Jess has absolutely no clue what a _Thanos_ is, but whatever it is, Loki doesn’t elaborate. He doesn’t finish the sentence at all, actually, because all the air he was using to talk seems to get stuck halfway up his botched throat, and he cringes, holding his breath for a second before letting it out in a tremulous little huff. There’s a faint whistle as the air leaves his half-crushed windpipe.

This time, when Claire tells him to stop trying to talk, he listens.

Because he’s already knocked out again.

Silence dominates. Jess clenches and unclenches her fists, waiting.

They both stand there for another thirty seconds or so, watching him, until Jess is one hundred percent certain he’s not waking back up any time soon.

“Well,” she finally says, still staring down at him. “That was only marginally less fucking weird than I thought it’d be.”


	3. Chapter 3

Once, when Claire was a teenager, she ran into some B-list actor from an 80’s sitcom her mom was always obsessed with. Literally _ran_ into him outside some coffee shop on Fifth. He stepped into her path without looking, knocked her coffee all over the pavement, then apologized with surprising sincerity and offered to buy her a new one. And Claire knew next to nothing about the guy, she’d never even really been a fan — not like her mom was, anyway — but the five minute conversation stuck in her brain for a long, long time. Seeing someone in person who, until that moment, had been nothing but pixels on a TV screen was… disorienting. It was _weird._

Seeing the guy from the Incident is like that.

Except the feeling is dialed to a hundred because he’s not a _celebrity,_ he’s a goddamn alien supervillain who could break her like a twig if he wanted to. And then it’s dialed back down, slightly, because he’s unconscious and hurting and, at some point, Claire’s brain just goes ahead and scrubs out “alien terrorist” and rewrites “unnamed patient” in its place.

It keeps her focused. Keeps her sane.

When he’s out cold and barely breathing, he’s not Loki, God of Mischief, Guy Who Destroyed Half of Midtown. He’s just… a guy. A guy who’s got more power than any one guy should ever have, yeah, but a guy who’s _also_ been beaten half to hell and who’s teetering on the edge of maybe dying on her couch.

So. Nothing new then.

When he’s awake, though, it’s a bit different.

The first time he wakes, Claire’s shocked at how automatic the fear is. The guy’s still half-dead, and Jess is still here in case things go south, and really, it makes no sense for Claire to be afraid of him when she just spent a huge amount of effort to keep him alive, but—

But she was there, six years ago. She remembers the evac. She remembers the broadcasts, the massive _things_ flying through the sky, the footage of him fighting the Avengers.

She hides it pretty well, though. And in any case, he seems too preoccupied with healing himself — literally healing himself, like, with what she’s pretty sure is actual magic — to notice or to bother attacking either of them. Or, to bother attacking Claire, anyway. He does send Jess flying across the room when she first grabs him, but Claire gets the distinct feeling that even that is one hell of a lot less than what he’s capable of.

Like it wasn’t even a warning. Like it was just a _flinch._

And he passes right back out in less than ten minutes anyway. Asks where he is, says something that's definitely not even a real word — what the hell is “Thanos” supposed to mean, anyway? — and then he's dead to the world again.

So, less weird than it could have been. Jess put that more-or-less right.

A while later, Claire’s got her head pillowed on her forearms on the kitchen table, and she’s even managed to squeeze in a genuine power nap despite the caffeine still buzzing like a live wire behind her eyes. A sound comes from the living room, a static sort of hum, and she blinks awake to a jolt of fear. What the hell is that, more magic?

She sits up, waits, listens.

It’s not magic. It was the short hum and _click_ of her TV turning on.

Claire looks toward the stove, blinking until her vision clears.

7:32. She actually managed to nap for a full two hours. She takes a deep breath and scrubs at her face, then flips over her phone to take a look at the screen.

No new notifications. She casts a wary glance toward the living room, then looks back down at her phone and sends off a quick text to Roberto, since he asked her to keep him posted. It’s just a brief update — that their resident alien isn’t gonna die any time soon — and a request for him to keep his eyes and ears open, to let her know if he hears anything about Loki, or the Avengers, or anything he thinks might be relevant.

She bites her lip, tapping the phone idly against the table.

She _hopes_ they won’t need the Avengers. She hopes saving the guy’s life will have been enough to deter any supervillainy he might be planning, for the time being. She hopes that they might be able to settle into an enemy-of-my-enemy sort of thing, at the very least, since whatever caused the shitshow that was yesterday must have been many, many times worse than the guy who could barely manage to take over a few city blocks with an entire army at his back.

She hopes.

Then she sighs, pulls both hands through her hair, and pushes the chair back with her knees as she stands.

When she leaves the kitchen, she finds Jess sitting sideways on her recliner with her legs dangling off the one armrest, her eyes fixed on the TV, brows knit together and a frown set on her face. A handle of whiskey that’s only about a quarter full sits on her stomach, balanced between her hands. She glances up at Claire as she enters the room, then directs her attention back to the screen.

The injured Asgardian on her couch, on the other hand, might as well not have noticed Claire at all. He's awake though, as in  _actually_ awake, sitting up and everything. He still looks gaunt and pale and… well, close to how she’d expect someone to look if they were choked half to death and barely made it back, except nearly all of the bruising has faded already. The popped blood vessel in his left eye is gone. The swelling’s down.

He still looks kind of dead, but even that much is incredible.

Because by all accounts, he should be doing more than just _looking_ dead.

 _I barely even had to do anything for him,_ she thinks, not for the first time. _Other than keeping it from getting worse. Other than moving him somewhere he was less likely to get shot._

He’s leaning forward, elbows on his knees, the TV remote in one hand. His other hand hovers over his throat like he’s still trying to pump some of that magic green light into it, but there isn’t so much as a glow that Claire can see, not anymore. Maybe that’s what he _was_ doing, until his attention was drawn elsewhere.

His eyes remain fixed on the TV.

The news stations are reporting on the disappearances. That’s what they’re calling them, disappearances, not deaths, and Claire has no idea whether that’s bullshit or not. She leans against the kitchen doorway and crosses her arms, watching. Live footage shows smouldering craters down near Washington Square Park, then clips from yesterday show Iron Man fighting off some kind of mutant-Godzilla-looking alien. The classic white beams of light, the explosions, and then a quick flash of red — that spider kid from Queens, apparently, got involved somehow.

More footage shows a massive metal ship the shape of a donut and the size of a damn skyscraper, hovering right over… where is that, downtown? Claire can’t tell.

The view cuts over to a news anchor. One anchor, even though there’s two seats. He goes into some vague news about an alien invasion all the way in Wakanda, but that’s all they have, just rumors, no footage.

A crawl bar along the bottom of the screen lists a series of names. Politicians, celebrities, household names that were wiped out along with half of the rest of humanity. Claire doesn’t see any of the Avengers on that list, none that she recognizes, but the list is _long._ Too long, so long that it sends a stone sinking into her gut. The Avengers’ names could very well just be further down to line.

“… I was too late.”

Claire raises an eyebrow, turns to see Loki staring at the screen, eyes wide and fixed on the coverage that’s now turning to footage of people — dozens of them, hundreds of them — collapsing into heaps of dust. Football players disappearing in the middle of a play, half the stadium’s audience wafting away with the wind.

Loki doesn’t look at either Jess or Claire, doesn’t look away from the news report.

He doesn’t even seem to realize that he said anything.

Jess gives a huff that Claire might have mistaken for a laugh if not for the miserable look on her face. She pushes off the recliner, bottle dangling from her fingertips as she strides right past Claire into the kitchen. Claire doesn’t turn away from the TV, but she hears Jess plunk the whiskey bottle down onto the table and then fish around her bag for one of the other two. Plastic rustles, glass clinks together.

The news switches over to commercials, and Loki changes the channel.

Loki, God of Mischief, Guy Who Destroyed Half of Midtown, sitting on her couch and changing the channel on her TV with her remote.

It’s… more than a little weird.

He flicks through two, three, four more news reports, and all of them say the same thing. No one has any idea what the hell happened. No one has any idea how to fix it, and no way in hell do they know how to keep moving on from it. Cities everywhere are in disarray, and New York is doing no better than anywhere else. They’re reporting on riots, plane crashes, unmanned power plants going up in smoke, dozens of cars piled up on the highways. Disasters on top of disasters on top of disasters.

He turns the TV off and tosses the remote aside so that it smacks into the recliner Jess had been sitting in. He closes his eyes and ducks his head down for a moment, one hand still hovering over his neck, the other tugging through his hair.

For a moment, the only sound is his ragged breathing, and the sound of Jess opening and shutting a cabinet in the kitchen.

“You said… this is New York.”

It takes a second for Claire to realize that the quietly rasping voice is being directed at her, and before she can think to answer, he slowly lifts his head, looking her in the eye for the first time, one hand still over his throat. Claire tightens her grip on her own arms, maintaining his gaze even as her pulse quickens.

She knows that this guy is dangerous, a literal alien terrorist, essentially what someone as disgustingly powerful as any of the Avengers would be if they didn't give a shit about human life.

She _knows_ that. She does.

But right now?

Right now he looks very, very human. Which is honestly a little bit scarier.

“Yeah,” she answers. “We’re in New York.”

“Earth,” he says, and it’s not a question. “So you—” Again his voice cuts off, and his features twist in frustration as his grip tightens around his own throat, but he presses on anyway. “You know of… the Avengers, then.”

Claire nods.

“Are they—?” He pauses, winces again. “Which of them are alive?”

She shakes her head. “I don’t know.”

For a moment, he only stares at her. His gaze darts from one of her eyes to the other, and Claire gets the weird, uncomfortable feeling that she’s being scrutinized, that he’s studying her, looking for a lie.

At that moment, Jess returns to the room, and she’s apparently decided to start drinking from a glass instead of straight from the bottle this time around. She idly swirls the half-empty glass in her hand, cradling a new unopened bottle to her side as she strides across the room and lets herself fall unceremoniously back onto the recliner.

Loki spares her a glance, then looks toward the blank TV screen, then again to Claire.

“And…” he starts to ask, stops, and Claire doesn’t know how she knows, but she _knows_ that his inability to finish the question has nothing to do with his injured vocal cords. He gulps, looks away, and quietly asks, “… and Thor?”

Claire opens her mouth, but she hesitates.

She glances to Jessica, who meets her gaze over the rim of her glass.

Because Claire knows they’re both thinking the same thing. The last they saw of this guy, he was intent on taking over the whole damn world, on turning all of Manhattan to a pile of rubble, on fighting his way through the Avengers and probably killing them, too. He could be asking about the Avengers now, about Thor, for any number of reasons. He could be asking because he needs to get as far away from them as possible. He could be asking so that he can figure out his next attack.

But Claire knows that tone. She knows Jessica knows that tone. They’ve both heard it plenty of times over the last twenty-four hours.

Claire admits, “We don’t know that, either.”

The disappointment is clear on his face. A tinge of anxiety, the stress of _not knowing_ that Claire recognizes immediately. His eyes close, and he gulps again, his jaw tightening for half a second before he lowers his head into his free hand, the one not occupied with guarding his throat. His shoulders slowly lift as he takes in a steady breath, and Claire notices that it no longer rattles in his chest, no longer whistles on its way through his windpipe. His health is improving every second, which she has to admit is… promising, even if it’s still a little nerve-wracking.

Jessica finally breaks eye contact with Claire to return her attention to her drink. She chugs the rest of her glass like it’s water and not hard liquor, gulping until the glass is empty, and she lets out a satisfied breath as she plunks the glass down on the coffee table loud enough to draw everyone’s attention to it. Claire raises an eyebrow at her. Loki opens his eyes, lifts his head out of his hand.

Rather than say anything to either of their questioning looks, Jessica unscrews the cap from her second handle of whiskey with a _pop._ Then she pours a new glass, and the only sound in the silent living room is the slosh of whiskey, the glugging of air bubbles through the bottleneck. She pours and pours until the glass is filled nearly to the rim.

Then she slides the glass across the coffee table until it sits right in front of Loki.

“Yeah,” Jessica flatly says, and there’s a lot in that one word, Claire thinks.

 _Yeah,_ this is a shitshow.

 _Yeah,_ we know.

 _Yeah,_ we don’t know what the hell to do, either.

Jess takes a hefty gulp from the bottle, gives the literal Norse God on Claire’s couch a tight-lipped smile, and lifts the bottle in her second mock toast of the day. “Welcome to the shitty club.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (for those unfamiliar with how much drinking is Too Much, a handle of whiskey over the course of six-ish hours would leave even the burliest man blitzed out of his goddamn mind in real life -- however, i'm assuming the process that gave jess her super strength also altered her metabolism a bit; that plus a decade or so of steady alcoholism means she can handle quite a bit more and still be functional)


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you again for all the comments, i am genuinely blown away at the response this little pet project of mine has gotten ♥

By the time he’s downed Jessica’s entire second handle of whiskey and started on the third — not that it seems to be affecting him much, if at all — Loki gradually shifts in Claire’s mind. He's definitely not _unnamed patient_ anymore, but he's not _alien terrorist_ either. He's not even _Loki, God of Mischief, Guy Who Destroyed Half of Midtown_ anymore.

He's just… Loki. The name loses some of the otherworldly and threatening connotations it used to have, over the course of the following hour in which he just _talks_ to them, like a semi-normal person, while he works on being able to breathe properly again. Until it’s just another name. Until it’s just what they’re supposed to call him.

Had to happen eventually, she figures.

Now Claire’s settled herself cross-legged on one end of the couch, a bowl of cereal between her legs, her phone sitting on her thigh so she can scroll through news reports while she eats.

The news is very suspiciously Avengers-free. There’s still nothing reported on them at all, not officially, and all Claire’s managed to find on the internet has been a brief sighting of what _might_ have been their fancy jet flying over the Atlantic. Someone tweeted about seeing it over Ghana at 10AM local time, so 5AM here. _Maybe_ it was headed west. No one really knows yet.

And that’s it. That’s all there is.

Jess, draped across Claire’s armchair and squinting at the ceiling, says for maybe the fifth time:

“Ig-drassle.”

 _“Yggdrasill,”_ Loki corrects, idly tipping the three-quarters full handle of whiskey back and forth in his lap. It leans against his right thigh, then his left, right, then left.

“Eeg-drassle.”

_“Yggdrasill.”_

“Eeg… drah-sill?”

“Closer.”

“That's what I said the first time.”

“It's not.”

Jess huffs, but apparently decides not to argue it. “And you just, what? Climb the tree, and the branches lead back to the real world?”

“It’s rather more complex than _climbing a tree,”_ Loki says, shooting her a look as if he's almost offended at the comparison. His voice has lost a bit of its wheezing-through-a-crushed-windpipe quality. Now it just sounds like he’s got a bad sore throat. “And saying the ‘real world’ implies that the others are any less real, which is not the case. But…” he trails off, lets out a breath, looks down at the bottle, “… more or less, yeah.”

Jess tilts her head, squinting thoughtfully at Claire’s ceiling. “Could anybody do that?”

“I highly doubt it.”

“But you’re not sure?”

“Even I could barely do it,” Loki says, “after centuries of studies and practice and with a wealth of _seiðr_ at my disposal. So, yes, I’m fairly sure.”

Jess wrinkles her nose. “Saydeer?”

_“Seiðr.”_

“Sayder.”

_“Seiðr.”_

“Seether.”

“You can just say magic,” Loki says, sagging down into the couch and leaning his head back with a roll of his eyes. He stays there, looking up at the ceiling like Jess is, still tapping the bottle of whiskey back and forth. “And in any case it's not _enjoyable,_ walking the branches of _Yggdrasill_ to cross Realms. It's not something to do for a bit of fun. Hell, I only did it in the first place because…”

He trails off, chewing the inside of his cheek. Claire glances down at her phone again, refreshes the page even though she knows nothing else is gonna show up.

“Because you had to get back,” Claire finishes for him. She knows that much, at least, from the Cliff Notes version of events that he’s given them so far.

“After you were choked to death by the same asshole that dusted everybody in the Universe with a magic glove and six magic rocks,” Jess recounts. And when Loki opens his mouth to reply, she cuts in, _“Half_ of everybody, whatever. Don’t be pedantic.”

He closes his mouth, tilts his head _just_ a hair — probably all he can manage at the moment — and murmurs his assent.

“Seems kind of personal,” Claire says. “Why not just dust you, too?”

Loki lets out a sigh. “Because it _was_ personal.”

“Because he had something to do with you attacking New York last time.” Jess doesn’t bother hiding the skepticism in her tone, not even a little. She _hasn’t,_ for the more vague bits of his story, but Loki doesn’t seem to care whether either of them believes him or not.

“Mm-hmm.”

That’s it, no explanation of _what_ this Thanos guy had to do with the Incident. Loki’s refused to elaborate on that no less than three times.

“Okay,” Jess relents, “fine, so just — let me make sure I got this straight. This guy fought Thor, won, fought the Hulk, won, then killed you, and then he went after these magic rocks —”

“Infinity Stones.”

“— yeah, whatever, and the rest of the Avengers must have tried to stop him, which if they did it obviously worked out just fucking _great._ So then you climbed the Tree of Life or whatever to get back into your body, and it worked.”

“It did.”

“Just, you know, half a day too late,” Jess adds. “And your body was also floating in the middle of space with a broken neck.”

“That’s… the gist, yes.”

“And then you teleported to Earth,” Claire says, because she still has trouble believing that part. “Actually _teleported.”_

“It’s rather a bit more complicated than —”

“Dude,” Jess cuts in. “Seriously. Just call it what it is.”

Loki deflates, sagging once more back into the couch. “Sure. Yes. I teleported.”

“Guess you didn’t think to aim for a hospital?” Claire asks.

“I wasn’t exactly aiming for an _alley,_ if you must know, and much less one in a place called something as ridiculous as _Hell’s Kitchen,”_ Loki says, and he takes another sip from the handle he’s still holding. He doesn’t lift his head away from the couch, though, just lifts and tips the bottle, so he only manages what must be a thimble’s worth of whiskey before he has to lower it again. “Clearly, I missed.”

“Pretty sure you ended up somewhere in the stratosphere, actually,” Claire says. “You sort of came down like a meteor.”

“Again, I missed.” He shrugs one shoulder. “Do you have any idea how quickly your planet is hurtling through space at any given moment?” He pauses, tries to clear his throat and aborts the effort halfway through with a wince. “Instantaneous travel requires a highly advanced series of spells, and I was performing them while aiming for a moving target, after having recently returned from the dead, while being entirely incapable of _breathing_ and verging on the cusp of dying all over again. I would say I managed fairly well, thank you.”

As she returns her attention to her phone, Claire concedes, “Can’t argue that, I guess.”

Jess gives a little snort of a laugh. “Yeah. Guess not.”

Claire swallows the last spoonful of cereal, then lifts up the bowl to drink the last of the milk at the bottom. Her eyes stay on her phone. She refreshes Twitter, searches news websites for the Avengers, for Thor, for Tony Stark, anything that might give them a hint.

“But why Earth?” Jess asks. “Don’t you have your own planet to go to?”

A beat of silence is all that follows her question at first, then another, and Loki doesn't move his head from the back of the couch.

“No,” he says at length, still staring at the ceiling. “No, I don’t.”

“Made yourself Public Enemy Number One there, too, huh?”

“For a short while, yes,” Loki answers, in an almost wistful those-were-the-days kind of tone that makes Claire look up from her phone and raise her eyebrows at him. “Because of what I did here, actually. But… no. I don’t have my own planet to go back to because my own planet no longer exists. It was destroyed.”

Claire blinks, eyes wide. “What, you mean Asgard doesn’t exist anymore? At all? Just…” She puts her hands together like she’s cupping a baseball, mimes a tiny explosion with her fingers. “Poof? The whole planet’s gone?”

Loki gives the tiniest little nod, barely a tilt of his chin.

“Did this Thanos guy do that, too?”

He shakes his head, or rocks it from side to side on the couch at least, and then winces when even that much movement tugs at the still healing muscles in his neck. “No,” he says. “That was… someone else. A story for another time, I’m sure.”

Jess leans up in her seat a bit, propping herself up on her elbow so she can twist around to shoot yet him another skeptical look. When he doesn’t look in her direction to see it, Jess exchanges a glance with Claire instead, then shrugs and flops back down into the armchair.

“Yeah,” Jess says. “Sure. But still, why Earth? Aren’t there plenty of other places left where the feds _don’t_ want your head on a platter?”

Loki takes in a deep breath and lets it out in a huff. “Obviously, but… Let’s just say it is very much in my interest that Thanos is defeated. I simply headed in the general direction of Thanos’ greatest threat.”

“Earth?” Claire asks. “Or just the Avengers?”

Loki glances to her out of the corner of his eye, then as he lifts the bottle for another sip he answers, “Thor.”

“Hate to break it to you,” Jess says in a tone that sounds like she doesn’t _actually_ hate to break it to him, “but this guy already got past Thor, didn’t he? Twice, the way you’re telling it. What the hell kind of a difference are you gonna make against a guy that got past all the Avengers _and_ Thor?”

Surprisingly, he actually seems to consider that for a moment rather than just immediately biting some smart comment at her. His fingers drum against the side of the whiskey bottle as he chews on the inside of his cheek.

“To be perfectly honest,” he says, “I’m not —”

But he doesn’t get a chance to tell them what he’s not.

Because at that moment, there’s a knock at the door. A quick knock, two little taps that are so quiet Claire almost doesn’t notice it.

_Shit._

Jess pushes herself up on her arms, looks to Claire with an eyebrow raised.

Loki lifts his head to stare at the door, eyes wide, every muscle tensed.

Claire doesn’t fail to notice that the air in the room suddenly has a frayed sort of edge to it, humming with an odd energy she can’t quite describe. She sure as _hell_ doesn’t fail to notice that more of that greenish light has started to gather around Loki’s fingers, tinting the whiskey bottle with bars of emerald through the amber.

Shit. _Extra_ shit. Very bad. He can’t just go magic-ing up the place because of a knock on the door. Claire lifts a hand toward him, waving him down in the universal signal to _hang on, wait._

The doorknob turns.

Jess slowly and carefully gets to her feet, her narrowed eyes fixed on the door.

Someone gently prods the door open.

“Claire?” the newcomer asks, and Claire's shoulders sag with relief when he steps through the doorway. Roberto. It’s just Roberto. Thank God. “Jessica— _AH!”_

“Roberto — shit, Loki, don’t — !” Claire yells, scrambling to her feet, because holy shit, _when_ did Loki cross the whole damn apartment? He’s _already over there,_ he’s _already_ reached Roberto and shoved him back into the wall beside the door, like he jumped up off the couch and vaulted over the coffee table in the time it took Claire to _blink_ —

And just _when the hell did he get a goddamn knife?_

By the time Claire gets to him — all of about three seconds later — Jess has leapt off the armchair and thrown herself at Loki without, apparently, giving it so much as a second’s thought. She rams her shoulder right into the spot beneath his ribs and sends them both careening into the floor, and even as they fall over in a shouting tumble, Roberto stays wide-eyed and stammering with his back pressed to the wall and his arms up in surrender.

“Asshole!” Jess practically snarls, shoving herself off of Loki and jumping to her feet.

 _“¿Estás bien?”_ Claire gently asks as she reaches Roberto. She shuts the door beside him, being sure to double check the lock this time. It had slipped her mind, before, when the biggest possible threat was already inside, laid out on her couch.

Jessica has now planted herself firmly between Loki, who is just beginning to push himself up off the floor, and Claire and Roberto, the latter of whom is still trying to get a handle on his own rapid breathing. She shouts, “You can’t just fucking attack _whoever you want!”_

“Roberto,” Claire tries again. _“¿Estás bien?”_

It takes a second, but Roberto gives a quick, shaky nod.

In the meantime, Loki gets to his feet, shooting a glare at Jessica and then a suspicious glance over her shoulder at Roberto. He’s several shades too pale, one hand hovering over his neck again, but that’s all the indication he gives that he’s aggravated his injury at all.

“You said that if anyone found out I was here—”

“He’s a friend, you _moron._ He helped us carry your heavy ass up here in the first place.”

“And either way,” Claire adds, keeping one gentle hand on Roberto's shoulder as she shoots a look at Loki, “I'd appreciate it if you wouldn't go starting a knife fight in my home.”

“Wait,” Jess says, looking back and forth between Claire and Loki. “Where the hell'd the knife go? Is it still on you?”

For a moment Loki only stares at the three of them with his eyes narrowed. Then, once he seems satisfied that Roberto doesn’t actually pose a threat, Loki rolls his eyes and gives a little wave of his hand. The knife reappears, shimmers into existence right there in his palm, and with a look at all three of them that feels entirely too patronizing, he passes the fingers of his other hand through the knife’s blade like he’s playing with the flame on a candle — and it flickers and bends like a flame would, too.

A mirage. A damn _mirage._

“It never was,” he answers.

“Oh, sure, ‘cause that makes it A-OK,” Jess responds with a deadpan stare, and she turns away from him to look at Roberto. “You good?”

Roberto, to his credit, seems to have recovered pretty quickly. Sort of. Given the circumstances, anyway. He nods, offering Jess the closest thing to a grateful smile that he can probably manage, and says, _“_ _Sí.”_

“Cool,” she says, then jabs a thumb over her shoulder at Loki. “Roberto, undead alien asshole. Undead alien asshole, Roberto.”

“I’m not _undead.”_

“You said you were dead, and now you’re not,” Jess says, shooting him one of her best I-don't-give-a-shit looks, and she turns up her hands in a shrug before she lets them fall to her sides again. “That’s undead.”

“He is… awake,” says Roberto.

Loki raises an eyebrow. “Observant one, isn’t he?”

“Hey, I know this is hard for you,” Jess says, “but maybe try not to be a dick.”

“And in his defense, you really shouldn’t be awake,” Claire tells Loki. “Healing from a broken neck in a few hours isn’t exactly normal for us.” She shakes her head and turns back to Roberto. _“¿Seguro que estás bien?”_

Again Roberto nods, and then he lets out his breath in a huff. _“Sí, sí,”_ he assures her, finally relaxing from his stiff stance against the wall so that she starts to believe it. Then, with one last wary look in Loki’s direction, he reaches into the deep pocket of his sweats and he says, “I — um, I have been researching. I think I found something.”

“Yeah?” Jess asks. “Anything on a big purple dickhead named Thanos?”

“Purple…?” Roberto says, glancing up from his phone to send a briefly confused look in her direction. “Uh, no. No.”

It's then that Claire remembers. She texted Roberto, just a few hours ago, asking him to keep an eye out. At the time it had been on the off chance that they might need back-up, but now…

“What'd you find?” Claire asks.

“The Avengers. The news stations, they are hiding all news about them for now.”

“Yeah,” says Claire. “We’ve noticed.”

Roberto nods. _“Sí._ But they are here.”

“They’re what, now?” Jess asks.

“They are — ah, not _here,_ but…” Roberto tilts his phone so all three of them can see the screen. Then he opens, of all things, _Snapchat._ Claire crosses her arms, tilting her head and waiting to see what he’s found. Roberto pinches his fingers on the screen, and the picture zooms out until they’re looking at a map, then he moves the map just a bit so that it’s centered on some place upstate, just north of Poughkeepsie. “Here.”

He taps the spot, a little blip of blue on a map of plain beige, and it immediately starts up a video. It’s a shaky, blurry image clearly taken by somebody in a rush, but there’s no mistaking what the video is showing.

There, above a thick overhang of oak trees and evergreens, a little dark gray jet plane seems to defy gravity and hang in the air like it’s a helicopter, lowering until it disappears below the cover of the trees. The jet is maybe a mile or so off of where the video was taken, but even so, the distinctive shape is hard to miss. They’ve all seen it plenty of times on magazine covers, and in news footage over the past six years or so.

The Avengers’ Quinjet, landing in upstate New York, right around where their headquarters is supposed to be.

“Twenty-three minutes ago,” Jess reads, leaning in with her arms crossed. She glances up at Roberto and asks, “Any other shots of it?”

Roberto shakes his head, and he taps the screen a few times so that it cycles through other shots. None of it’s relevant. Just a few shots of televisions, news clips Claire’s seen a dozen times, people filming from inside their cars, radio stations reporting on the disappearances. Roberto pockets his phone with an apologetic shrug.

“So they’re in New York,” Claire says. “That was, what, about an hour’s drive upstate? An hour and a half?”

Loki hasn’t said a word. He watches the three of them with an unreadable expression on his face, pressing the thumb of his right hand into the palm of his left.

Jess, on the other hand, has already whipped out her own phone. She paces back and forth in Claire’s living room, typing, then swiping something aside, then typing again. “New York,” she mutters to herself, “Poughkeepsie…”

She finds the phone number she was looking for, apparently, and dials it and presses the phone to her ear.

All three of them watch her. She stands in the center of Claire’s living room, one hand on her hip, staring pensively at the floor.

Then, when the person on the other end of the line picks up, Jess _transforms._ Her posture straightens out as she looks up, a creepily uncharacteristic smile appears on her face, and she says in a voice several octaves higher than Claire’s ever heard from her and with a southern twang:

“Hey there! My name’s Sheryl, I’m calling from Sparklin’ Crisp Dry Cleaners. Is a Mr. Thaddeus Ross available? We’ve got his suits here—”

She pauses, apparently having been cut off, and waits for a moment.

“Well, darlin’, this is the number he left us with,” Jess says. “Must’ve been a mistake, he seemed in a bit of a rush.”

Another pause. Jess drums her fingers against her hip.

“Oh, honey, I know, but we can’t just drop all our business every time a disaster hits, can we? Now, is there another number I can reach Mr. Ross at?”

After a beat, the smile on Jessica’s face shifts until it’s her own, a self-satisfied smirk rather than the placating fake-grin of whoever _Sheryl_ is.

“Thank you _so_ so much, darlin’, you have a good day now.”

She hangs up the phone, typing away again, searching something else.

Claire asks, “Jess?"

Without looking up from her phone, Jess comments, “Nothing like the end of the world to make everyone _real_ lax about security, huh?”

“Jess, what are you doing?”

“Hang on,” she answers, eyes still glued to her phone. “And remember this for me: Article Three, Section Five, Subheading K.”

Without another word she brings the phone to her ear again. It only rings once before someone on the other end picks up. And this time, Jess adopts an entirely new voice. Still an octave higher than her own, but now with a Brooklyn sort of accent to it rather than the sickly sweet southern twang.

“Yes, hello, Mr. Secretary. I’m calling from the offices of Jones and Temple, Attorneys at Law, requesting a status update on the enhanced individuals listed under the Sokovia Accords,” she says. There’s a pause, and this time she raises her voice to cut him off, “Yes, I’m well aware you’re under no obligation to report to the press, and I _agree,_ Mr. Secretary, this is no time to be stoking widespread panic by alerting the general public to any changes in the Avengers’ status, but again, I’m not with the press. And under—”

She waves a hand at Claire, who obliges, “Article Three, Section Five, Subheading K.”

“—Article Three, Section Five, Subheading K of the Sokovia Accords, you _are_ obligated to answer direct questions about the whereabouts and status of any enhanced individuals operating on American soil.”

She pauses, takes a deep breath that she’s clearly trying hard to keep quiet, and waits.

Jess has all of their undivided attention now. Claire, Loki, and Roberto are all watching, waiting for a sign that what she’s doing is working.

They get that sign after just a few seconds; Jessica’s shoulders drop, a bit of tension fading in relief, and she offers them a brief thumbs up.

There’s another minute or so in which Jess only listens, nodding along, occasionally offering a short, “Mm-hmm,” or a “Yes, of course,” and one, “And where is that, Mr. Secretary?” At one point in Ross’s apparent monologue, though, Jess glances up at Loki, and a nervous look flits across her features. “Uh-huh. Alright. That’s good to know,” she says. “Thank you for your cooperation, Mr. Secretary.”

With that, she hangs up, and she takes a slow breath, tapping her phone between her hands.

“Well,” she says, having returned to her own voice. “This is definitely a good news, bad news kind of situation.”

“Why is that?” Loki asks.

It’s the first thing he’s said since Jess began her investigations, since before Roberto even showed them the footage of the Avengers’ jet.

“Because, and I’m assuming this is good news, your brother’s still alive,” Jess says. That news alone doesn’t seem to have much of an effect on Loki, though; he’s still watching Jess intently, still fidgeting with his hands, clearly waiting for the other shoe to drop. “So are a lot of the Avengers, actually. And he wouldn't say exactly where their headquarters is, since apparently it's classified, but he confirmed they landed there about half an hour ago. I had a feeling that whole Sokovia Accords bullshit had something to do with the news blackout on the Avengers — turns out I was right. Ross is keeping everything _real_ quiet. Warned me to keep everything he told me quiet, too, and _strongly_ implied that doing otherwise would get us arrested, like, Big Brother black bag style.”

“He said that?” Claire asks.

“Implied.”

“And that’s the bad news?”

“Uh, no. The bad news,” Jess answers, “is that Ross demanded the immediate arrest of _all_ of the remaining Avengers as soon as they landed.”

 _“What?”_ Claire asks, her hands on her hips.

“Yeah,” Jess says with a wince. “Apparently some of them are refusing, but, uh… he said Thor went willingly. Didn't even try to argue.” She chews on the inside of her cheek, watching Loki as she breaks that particular bit of news. He might as well be made of stone, though, still as a damn statue. She continues, “So, you know, good news, your brother’s definitely alive and _not_ a pile of dust. Bad news, he’s being kept in some kind of super containment cell with _ridiculous_ amounts of security standing between him and anyone that wants to get to him. At least until Ross pulls his head out of his ass. Which…” She shrugs.

Claire sighs, pinching the bridge of her nose, and finishes for her, “Not likely any time soon.”

“Yeah.”

“What are the Sokovia Accords?” Loki asks, his voice perfectly even, brow creased.

All three of them turn to look at him, and all three of them hesitate.

Roberto offers, “It is… a long story?”

“Just a bunch of dumbass bureaucracy,” Jess says with a dismissive wave. “We can fill you in on the details later. We got, what, an hour and a half between us and the Avengers compound? Should be plenty of time.”

“I—” Loki starts to respond, then he blinks, looking almost  _comically_ thrown off by what Jess just said. “I’m sorry?”

“It’s an hour and a half away, maybe two hours, assuming we’ve got a car, which I don’t. Claire, do you?”

Claire starts to nod, but before she can answer aloud — or before she can ask,  _Hey, are we really sure we wanna do this?_ — Loki cuts her off.

“I cannot get into this compound in a _car._ And the three of you are most certainly not going there with me. _”_

“Oh?” Jess asks, rounding on him with her hands planted on her hips. “How do you plan on getting there, huh? You gonna teleport again with a half-broken neck? ‘Cause that worked out _so_ well last time, didn’t it?”

Loki’s already opened his mouth to retort, but he hesitates, just long enough to make it very clear that he definitely hadn’t planned his next course of action that far.

“Yeah. That’s what I thought.”

He bristles, regaining his voice well enough to argue, “I’ll find a way to—”

“You’ll find a way to get yourself killed again, yeah,” Claire interrupts this time. “Seriously, these guys are already trying to arrest all the Avengers that are left, right after they just tried to save everybody. What do you think they’ll do if they see _you_ just waltzing up to the place?”

Again it seems they’ve rendered him momentarily incapable of speech. He hadn’t thought of a way around that either, not yet. Claire gets the impression that he’s used to changing his plans as he goes — that, or he doesn’t consider anything on Earth to be a big enough threat to _require_ a plan. Maybe a bit of both.

Jess takes advantage of his half-second of stunned silence to say, “Cool, so that’s settled. We’re driving.”

“We are not—”

“Dude,” Jess cuts him off yet again. “Face it. We’re your best bet right now.”

She turns to Claire, raises an eyebrow at her, and the question is clear. _Are you in?_

Claire glances toward Loki, then to Roberto, then back to Jess. She takes in a breath, lets it out in one big woosh, and gives a helpless shrug. Hell, she’s the one who dragged Jessica into this mess with her in the first place, right?

Might as well see it all the way through.

“Yeah,” Claire says, already running through the logistics in her head. “Yeah.”  _Shit._ “Guess we’re breaking into the Avengers compound.”


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter is gonna get sad and angsty at the beginning, for reasons that should be clear within the first two sentences. forgive me. we get back to your regularly scheduled awkward road trip very shortly.

There is so, so much to be done.

Logically, Thor knows this.

He _does._

Even when a battle ends in victory, there is always so much to be done. Structures that need rebuilding. Wounds that need tending. Civilians that need relocating. Especially on Earth; its people are so numerous and so fragile that any catastrophe has the potential to send them into a disorganized frenzy, scattered and nearly decimated, desperate to regain order.

But now?

Now, the catastrophe is nothing like New York. It’s nothing like Sokovia. It’s like nothing Thor has ever seen, not in all his life. Regaining order feels far too unattainable to even _attempt,_ and rebuilding in the wake of Thanos’ destruction seems a laughable idea at best.

It’s still important, of course. It is. There are still so many people that need his help, not just Earth’s people but his own, too. Somewhere on the other side of the galaxy a smattering of the Grandmaster’s escape pods holds all that’s left of Asgard, adrift and lost. And it’s certainly true that Valkyrie was given the coordinates for Midgard, but — is Val even still alive? Did Thanos’ thoughtless slaughter of trillions leave her untouched?

It feels unlikely, with all that’s happened. And it's impossible to know whether Thor should take Stormbreaker right now and scour the galaxies for his people, or if that might make matters worse, might risk them arriving on a Midgard that's in shambles and with their king nowhere to be seen.

And the thought of the last remnants of Asgard only brings to mind all the _others,_ those that were not fortunate enough to make it to the escape pods, those that refused to run and instead turned, stone-faced and weaponless toward their attackers. It brings to mind the crumbling ruin of the _Statesman,_ the bodies lying despondent and scattered and lifeless, all those Asgardians that had only _just_ escaped yet another cataclysm, Asgardians that should have had centuries ahead of them with which to rebuild their lives.

“Hey.”

Thor blinks out of his reverie, but he hardly moves, sitting where he is on the little bench that makes the only seat in this cell. He turns his gaze up and finds Colonel Rhodes, standing just outside the glass barrier, arms crossed over his chest and an all-too-familiar concern set into his features.

“How you guys holding up?”

Luckily, Thor doesn’t have to answer, because Bruce does it for him.

“Good as we can be, I guess,” he says with a half-hearted little smile in Rhodey’s direction. Bruce has been pacing the length of the cell ever since they arrived, but he’s stopped now, stuffing his hands into the pockets of his jacket. “How ‘bout you?”

It’s a very fair question. Worry has carved itself into Rhodey’s face and set a permanent tenseness into his shoulders these last twenty-four hours. There’s still no word from Stark. And apparently there’s a sister, too, that Thor had never known about, a sister who has yet to return any of Rhodey’s calls.

Now Rhodey just shakes his head. He shrugs one shoulder with a look that says, _Oh, don’t you worry about me, I’m all good,_ and if Thor were in a better position to point out the obvious falsehood in that, he would.

But he’s not. So he doesn’t.

“Just worried about you guys,” Rhodey says. “You know you don’t have to be in here. Cap and Natasha still out there arguing it is proof enough. And you two weren’t even present when the Accords were written in. Ross can say it all he wants, but you’ve got rights.”

“It’s okay, Rhodey,” Bruce tells him. “Really. This is… easier for now.”

Rhodey’s concerned frown only deepens at that. His eyes shift from Bruce over to Thor, then back to Bruce. His brow creases. “You’re sure.”

“Yeah. You guys keep fighting Ross on it. Someone has to, but…” Bruce trails off, shrugs. “He’s gonna be a lot easier to deal with if I’m in here. Trust me. Plus, I think” — and he glances over his shoulder, a quick indecipherable look at Thor before he turns back to Rhodey — “I think we’ve had enough fighting for one day. Just for now. You know, until we figure out…”

He trails off again, and Rhodey, with a tentative smile on his face, finishes for him, “… what the hell we’re doing?”

It’s a smile that Bruce returns. “Yeah. Until then.”

Rhodey chews on his cheek, gives a quick nod.

“Okay, yeah,” he relents. “We’ll keep working on our next move.” It’s not the first time he’s mentioned that: their next move, his unwavering conviction that if the snap could be done, it can be undone. Somehow. Thor wants to share in that very human optimism, and he will, he tells himself. Eventually. “And we’ll see if we can get Ross to budge out here. You guys hold tight in there. I’ll be back around soon as I have an update. Sound good?”

“Yeah. Yeah, we can do that.”

Again Rhodey nods, and for a moment it looks like that might be the end of the conversation, that he might turn and leave, but he hesitates. He opens his mouth, closes it, opens it again.

“You guys saved a lot of lives, you know,” he finally says, and though he appears to be saying it for both of their benefits, his eyes linger on Thor as he says it. “I know it doesn’t feel like it, with how the fight ended. Believe me, I know, but… It would have been over a hell of a lot sooner without your help. That matters. Try not to forget that, alright?”

Thor maintains Rhodey’s gaze, unsure what to say to that. Unsure what he _can_ say to that, given the sharp lump that’s risen in his throat.

Rather than trust his voice, Thor only nods.

“Thanks, Rhodey,” Bruce says.

And with one last departing nod, Rhodey turns away. He pads across the room in his sneakers — the War Machine armor has been locked away in one of the compound’s vaults for the past several hours — and he leaves through the door that leads to the rest of the compound.

As soon as the door clicks shut, Bruce lets out a heavy sigh. His shoulders slump. He pulls one hand out of his pocket and scrubs it wearily over his face, steadfastly ignoring the tremor in his hands that, Thor’s noticed, has not gone away since the moment Thanos snapped his fingers. Maybe even earlier than that.

Then he turns and lets himself fall backward onto the bench beside Thor.

His company is… something, certainly, though Thor isn’t sure what. He’s not sure if he would prefer to be alone. He’s not sure he ever wants to be alone again.

“You okay, Thor?”

Looking down at his hands, Thor takes a slow breath and then echoes Bruce’s sentiment from earlier. His voice is still hoarse. “Good as I can be, I guess.”

At that, Bruce huffs a laugh, just the barest puff of breath. “Yeah, that’s fair.”

Thor shifts and leans back, lets his head fall back against the wall. Then, stringing together the longest sentence he's managed in recent memory, he says, “Rhodes is right, you know. You have rights. You’re under no obligation to be in here with me.”

Bruce shrugs. “Hey, I volunteered to go in here, same as you. And honestly, I’d rather not be around Ross any longer than I have to. Besides,” he says with another sigh, his eyes scanning over their surroundings, the fortified plexiglass that makes up the far wall, the blinking lights on the control panel on the wall to their left, “this cell wouldn’t exist if I didn’t, right? Doesn’t seem fair for you to be in here and not me.”

The only thing Thor can think to answer to that is another nod, so that’s all he gives. He gulps, trying to swallow down that awful feeling that still refuses to budge from his throat.

For a moment, silence dominates.

Bruce was right about one thing, for sure. Peacefully acquiescing to the Midgardian Secretary’s demands had been far easier than the alternative. It’s easier, for now, to stay here. It will make things easier for Rhodes and for Steve and for Natasha, out there fighting Ross over the decision. It makes things easier for Thor, gives him a moment of quiet to sit and to _think._

He takes another slow breath, forces the air into his lungs, closes his eyes.

“Borghilde,” he murmurs, mostly to himself, because there is so much to be done, but _this_ is something he can do now. “I bid you take your place…” Another breath, slower than the first. The lump shrinks by half a hair. “… in the halls of Valhalla, where the brave shall live forever. Nor shall we mourn, but rejoice…”

He works his way through all those he knows to have perished in the fight on the _Statesman,_ one at a time. All those whose last stand he himself witnessed. Borghilde, the old farmer who had — and Thor desperately hopes, still _has_ — a daughter in one of the escape pods. The twin metalworkers, Yaffa and Yaegar, who fell side by side. Halvor. Sylvi. Dagny. The Sakaaran soldier, Roscoe, who Thor never questions has well earned a place in Valhalla, Asgardian or not.

Eventually, Bruce joins him, once he’s heard the prayer pass through Thor’s lips enough times to have gathered an understanding of the words, of what they mean. And Thor’s voice gains a bit more confidence as long as it resonates in time with his friend’s.

That is, until —

“Heimdall,” Thor says, and he wrings his hands together in his lap so forcefully that they begin to hurt. He turns his gaze up to the ceiling, and his next breath is far, far shakier than any of the rest. “I bid… I bid you take your place…”

He trails off, and Bruce stops as well, seeming to have guessed that until Thor can push himself through the prayer, it shouldn’t be said at all. Instead he waits, his shoulder pressed against Thor’s upper arm — a comforting presence, a reminder that he’s not yet alone. Thor gulps again and presses on, “… in the halls of Valhalla, where the brave shall live forever. Nor shall we mourn, but rejoice, for those that have died the glorious death.”

That’s where he stops. He can’t bring himself to say the prayer for any of the Asgardians whose deaths he did not personally witness. They might still be alive, he tells himself. It wouldn’t be right.

He doesn’t say it for Loki, either.

He will, in time. He will. Once the dust has settled. Once Thanos has been brought to justice. He’ll send all of them off to Valhalla, officially, alongside the rest of his people as they mourn all they’ve lost and move on to rebuilding. Eventually. Because they _will_ all have made it to Valhalla by now, he has to believe that, regardless of whether those left behind have yet given them a proper ceremony. Every single one of them, for their valor in defending Asgard. Heimdall and Borghilde and Yaffa and Yaegar and all the rest.

Even Loki. Thor doesn’t doubt that even after all that's happened, his brother crossed that bridge just as their mother and father did before him, and that even now, at this very moment, he is taking his place in Valhalla's halls.

 

* * *

 

“This. Is. _Hell.”_

“Oh, relax,” Jess says with a roll of her eyes. The van lurches up over a particularly jagged curb and makes her teeth clack together.

“Absolutely torturous.”

“Oh my God,” Claire groans. “Is that all you do is whine?”

“I am not _whining,_ I’m voicing a valid complaint,” Loki insists. “Surely you must have a method of travel that's faster than this.”

“Look,” says Claire, massaging a temple with her free hand, “I know you didn't really get a chance to sight-see last time you were in New York — you know, back when you were busy causing mass destruction and everything? But in case you didn't know, there's a _lot_ of people here.”

“Were,” Jess corrects, under her breath. _“Were_ a lot of people.”

Claire glances sidelong at Jess before turning her eyes back to the road. “Yeah, there were, but half of New York is still a lot. Which means a lot of cars. This is…” She vaguely waves at their surroundings. “This is New York. This is just how it is.”

Jess frowns at the view through the passenger side window.

It's not quite New York, not really. It's a grayer, way subdued version of the city she's used to. The chaotic panic that overtook _everything_ yesterday has, overnight, been bogged down into a quiet desolation that Jess has never seen before. Not even after the Incident. Nearly all the cars in the gridlocked street lack any drivers whatsoever, some with their doors thrown wide open, others looking like no one was ever in the car to begin with. Claire's had to pull them up onto the sidewalk more than a few times to get around everything, and she keeps taking them down alleyways and side streets to avoid the ashen-faced clean up crews and the police blockades. Just in case.

Doesn't seem relevant to bring up, though. Not like the alien in the back seat cares what New York is _usually_ like when it hasn't just eked its way through half an apocalypse.

Instead she says, “If you wanted a quicker drive you should have done your swan dive somewhere Upstate.”

“In case you've forgotten, I never intended to drive at all.”

“Yeah, I know, you wanted to _abracadabra_ your way to—”

“Hey,” Claire cuts in. “Can we focus?

Jess sighs, leaning her forehead on the window, only to pull back at the last second as Claire hops a curb again. She sinks into her seat, arms crossed tight over her chest. “Right. Yeah. Any progress, Roberto?”

From the very back seat of the van, Roberto distractedly answers, “Uh… yes?” There's a faint _ratta-tap-tap_ of his rapid fire typing on the little laptop he brought along, and then, “The location is not so classified. It is given out to certain members of the press for certain events. It will take some more searching to know for sure, but…”

“Best guess?” Claire asks, glancing up at the rearview.

“… Esopus, maybe?”

That sounds about right, given the location on the Snapchat video he showed them. Jess nods, and Roberto falls silent except for the tapping of keys. The kid’s good with computers, as it turns out. Not “hacking through Stark tech” level good, but good. Better than the rest of them. Jess hopes it’ll be useful.

The van pulls out of an empty alleyway and, finally, Claire starts them up the ramp onto the highway. Her phone keeps buzzing in the cupholder, rerouting every time she has to detour around some new obstruction — a car crash, a downed telephone line, a _helicopter_ crash and the piles of rubble from the skyscraper it slammed into. There’s a five or six car pile-up just after the ramp, too, but she manages to squeeze the van between the wreckage and the concrete median.

“Okay, but how are we gonna get _into_ the building?” Claire asks, one hand on the wheel as she picks up her phone to double-check the directions. Again she casts a glance at Jess and adds, “Because no offense, but I don’t think a fake voice on the phone is gonna get us into the most secure facility north of Washington.”

Jess frowns. Yeah, they still don’t really have a plan for that. Roberto’s techie skills aren’t gonna get them through Stark brand security, and _she’s_ sure as hell not up for a fight against the goddamn Avengers and a bunch of armed government agents. Not all at once, not all in one place.

“I dunno,” she admits. “We’ll have to find out who’s got clearance, I guess, and then…”

“Maybe I could help with that.”

Jess almost jumps right out of her seat. Claire spits out a curse, swerving the van and coming  _this close_  to sideswiping an abandoned car in the next lane over. Roberto lets out a startled squeak and presses his back to the upholstery, laptop clutched to his chest.

Because Loki isn’t Loki anymore.

There, in the middle seat of the van where Loki was sitting just a few seconds ago, is Captain Fucking America. Like, the actual Captain America, sitting less than one goddamn foot away, complete with the star-spangled suit and the giant shield and the boy scout haircut and magazine-quality smile and _all_ of it.

Jess reaches out and pokes him in the cheek. Hard.

“Ow,” he complains in his own voice, and with a ripple of shimmering green light the image of Captain America fades away until Loki is sitting there again, ripped leathery clothes and dark hair and all. He rubs his cheek and glares at her like an annoyed little kid.

“What?” Jess asks. “You freaked me out.”

“Yeah, a little warning next time,” Claire says, rolling her eyes as she merges them onto a new highway.

“How did you do that?” Roberto asks, staring openly at Loki with his eyes wide.

“Magic,” Jess answers for him, turning and settling herself back in her seat. “Don’t ask. I already have enough of a headache.”

Claire peers into the rearview mirror. “So I’m assuming it’s back up to speed, then?”

“More or less,” Loki answers with a shrug, then pauses, and he wrinkles his nose. “But probably more less.”

“Yeah, well, pretending to be Captain America isn’t gonna help anyway,” Jess tells him. “Our _lovely_ Secretary of State wants him under lock-up, too. And even if Ross decides to let the whole thing go — and that’s a big if — Captain America is still gonna already be at the compound when we get there. They’ll know you’re not the real deal.”

“Well, pardon me for trying,” Loki grumbles. “Not that it matters, really. Any plans we make will only serve to get the three of _you_ into the building. They can’t stop me from getting in.”

“Actually, they can,” Claire says, grabbing the rearview mirror and turning it so she can look him in the eye. “No offense, but you’re not the worst thing these guys have dealt with.”

“She is right,” Roberto quietly agrees from the back seat.

“Plus,” Jess adds, “if they can keep someone like your brother or the big green guy from getting out, they can keep someone like you from getting in, genius.”

She crosses her arms and sags back into the seat, watching the trees rush by as Claire presses on the gas to accelerate around a slow-moving car in the right lane.

“The Hulk has been locked away as well?” Loki asks, his voice quiet.

“What? Yeah,” Jess says with a shrug. She hadn’t felt the need to mention that earlier, since Thor being locked up had seemed a bit more relevant. “Or, you know, the little version of him is, anyway.”

“Hey,” Claire speaks up as she glances up at the rearview. Blowing right past the news about the Hulk, she asks, “Can you do that whole” — she wiggles her fingers in the air — “magic disguise thing to make yourself look like anybody?”

“… Essentially, yes.”

“Can you make people see other things, too?”

When Jess looks over her shoulder, she sees Loki making another one of those patronizing faces that makes her itch to punch him in the jaw, and he answers, “Obviously.”

“Okay,” Claire responds, nodding distractedly, apparently unbothered by his attitude. Her thumb taps a rapid beat against the steering wheel. The gears are turning. “Okay, that… That could help, actually. That could help.”

 

* * *

 

During the drive, they slap together the bare bones of a plan.

They also try to gather everything they know about the current members of the Avengers. Thanks to the frustratingly vague briefing from Secretary Ross, they at least know which of them are still alive. Thor and Bruce Banner. Captain America and the Black Widow, who Ross actually referred to as “the fugitives Steven Grant Rogers and Natasha Romanoff,” which Jess still thinks was laying it on a _little_ thick. Colonel James Rhodes, the War Machine, who’s been court martialed but not detained — not yet — for breaching the Accords.

The Vision and Wanda Maximoff and Sam Wilson and the Winter Soldier are all confirmed dead, four names that only drew a confused, blank look from Loki. Clint Barton is presumed dead, but not confirmed. Tony Stark is officially M.I.A.

“So our real problem with getting into the Avengers compound isn’t even gonna be the Avengers,” Claire reasons. “Except for some of them. There’s Captain America and Black Widow—”

“Both of whom would take one look at me and attack on sight, I assure you,” Loki cuts in.

“Helpful,” Claire deadpans. “So it’s those two and the War Machine.”

“Yeah, and given that the War Machine is, you know, _human,”_ Jess adds, “he probably wouldn’t object to punching your lights out, either. Even if he _wasn’t_ all buddy buddy with Tony Stark.”

“Two Avengers whom I’ve tried to kill less than a decade ago, and one whose close friend I once threw from a fiftieth-story window,” Loki says, though it sounds like he’s keeping count mostly for himself. “Should be fun.”

“And there is the Hulk and Thor, too,” Roberto pipes up from the back.

“Who are both under voluntary lock-up,” Jess says.

 _Thank God,_ she doesn’t add. Not out loud. She might be able to hold her own against the Black Widow in a fair fight, maybe, and at least Captain America might pull his punches and give her a solid opening to either get the upper hand or get the hell out of dodge. But she’d be lying through her teeth if she said the prospect of even _seeing_ the Hulk didn’t turn her stomach to puddy.

“That’s good,” Claire says like she’s read Jessica’s mind.

Jess runs a hand over her face. “Yeah, but on the off-chance our info’s bad, and Thor and the Hulk _aren’t_ under lock-up—”

“The Hulk will…” Loki quietly interjects, “…probably not attack me on sight.”

“Seriously?”

“Probably. Certainly not with lethal force. The beast is… unpredictable, but I believe we’ve reached a truce of sorts. And this is assuming it’s even the Hulk we’d be dealing with, as opposed to Bruce, and that we’ll see him at all, given the arrest.”

 _“Bruce?”_ Jess repeats, making a face. “Since when the hell are you on a first name basis with one of the guys that kicked your ass last time you were here?”

Loki shrugs. “He’s been missing for the past two years, has he not? Where did you think he was all this time?”

“I don’t know, Fiji? Quebec? Argentina?” Jess asks. “Not fucking _space.”_

In response to that, Loki only shrugs again.

At that point Claire frowns at the rearview. “Okay, so… Just to keep this straight, Captain America and Black Widow would attack you on sight, and War Machine probably would, too. The Hulk might not even be a factor, but if he is, he probably won’t attack you. And it’s safe to assume Thor obviously wouldn’t,” she adds, eyes narrowing at the rearview mirror, “right?”

Jess and Claire wait for his answer, and when it doesn’t come Jess pauses for a second and then twists around in her seat to direct a wide-eyed stare at Loki.

“Right?” Claire repeats, grabbing the mirror. “Loki.”

Again he doesn’t give an immediate response, and when he does, it’s only with a wince and an, “Eh…?”

Roberto blinks, looking up from his laptop to stare at the back of Loki’s head. _“What?”_

“Are you _kidding_ me?” Jess asks, jaw dropping.

“Loki!” Claire shouts.

“I’m not—”

“Seriously?” Jess cuts him off. “We’re driving two hours up to bumfuck nowhere to break into the Avengers facility because _you”_ — she jabs a finger at him — “told us they’d probably have some master plan to fix this shit, and you’re just telling us _now_ that the strongest, scariest asshole on the team might attack you the second he sees you?”

“He won’t cause any harm to anyone else,” Loki assures them, and then he turns to look out the window, fidgeting with his hands again. “But he might be… cross, with me.”

“For _what?”_

“For dying,” Loki answers, in the most casual tone, like dying is just a thing people do, and it’s a thing they do specifically to annoy their super-powerful lighting-God brothers. Like death is just something to be brushed off. He adds, “Or, more accurately, for _pretending_ to die, since he’s quite likely to see it that way. That, among… among other things.”

There’s a pause, and then Claire shakes her head, grip tightening on the steering wheel. “So you’re saying we might be driving up there just to get caught in the middle of a fight between two _literal_ Gods. Is that what you’re saying?”

“We’re not technically Gods.”

“Yeah, whatever, Gods or not, there tends to be a _lot_ of collateral damage whenever you guys pick a fight around normal people,” Claire says. “And I’m not looking to go diving into the crossfire any time soon—”

“You won’t,” Loki cuts in, rolling his eyes and finally looking away from the window to direct a pointed look at the rearview mirror. “As I’ve said, he won’t cause harm to anyone else. Thor has a… peculiar fondness for humanity. He would only attack me. And not even lethally, at that. Just” — he pauses, makes a face like he just got a bad taste in his mouth — “unpleasantly.”

Jess knows she must be staring at him like he’s grown a second head, so she lets out a huff and turns away, falling back into her seat.

“And in case you’ve forgotten,” Loki adds, “if all goes according to plan, I won’t look like me, anyway.”

“Yeah, until we actually _find_ Thor,” Claire argues. “Then what?”

“Then what follows will be my problem,” Loki says. “Not yours.”

Jess ignores them both, pinches the bridge of her nose, tries to think. She wishes they had a little more firepower than her particular brand of very vulnerable super strength and one idiot demigod that’s only half on the mend from a broken neck. She wishes they had a little more time to figure out what the fuck they’re even _doing,_ trying to get into the Avengers compound in the first place.

Mostly she just wishes she brought that last handle of whiskey with her. It’s still sitting on Claire’s coffee table with a glass or two left at the bottom.

She sighs, dropping her hand and opening her eyes.

Part of her still wants to turn back, say _fuck this,_ and drink herself further into oblivion so she can forget about Infinity Stones and sort-of-Gods and the Sokovia Accords and all her missed voicemails and the pile of dust by Oscar’s couch.

If they get into the compound, though, they might get answers. They might figure out some way to help fix things. Loki seems to think he’ll be able to help, at least. Somehow.

Saying _fuck this_ is still really, really tempting.

Instead she says, “Whatever. No point in driving all the way back now, right?”

 

* * *

 

If Claire has it her way, she is never going to drive again. Ever.

Thanks to all the detours they have to take — around mangled car wrecks and downed telephone poles, piles and piles of abandoned vehicles, and an honest-to-God _commercial airline crash_ spewing thick smoke in the middle of Route 9 — it takes her two and a half hours to get them from Manhattan all the way up to Esopus.

Two and a half hours. It gives them plenty of time to hash out the beginnings of a plan, at least. Silver linings.

With the little laptop Roberto brought along, he’s managed to find them a blurry and completely unlabelled blueprint of the Avengers compound and some equally blurry satellite images of the grounds. He even managed to hack through some of the lowest level security measures — the low-grade, _not_ designed by Tony Stark himself security measures. It gets them a fuzzy view of the outskirts of the grounds, a few greenish fields and trees and walkways and a far-off view of the compound itself. Not much, but more than they had. Better than going in completely blind.

The last thing Roberto did was dig into the social media profiles belonging to Stark’s secretary who works the front desk, and both of their security guards.

 _Both_ guards. Because they only have two. Like, before half the Universe disappeared, they only ever had two. It makes sense, she _guesses,_ technically, since these guys are the Avengers and they can defend themselves just fine on their own if push comes to shove. Hell, the guards were probably only ever there as a formality, but… still.

Claire scrubs her hands over her face.

“This is a crap idea.”

They’re about half a mile from the compound. She’s parked the van on the shoulder of a quiet road, beneath the canopy of thick oak trees that line the curb as far as they can see in both directions. Claire is sitting on the van’s roof, one knee bent up to her chest, the other leg dangling over the edge.

After that drive, sitting back down in her mom’s van just wasn’t gonna happen, and apparently she wasn’t the only one who felt that way, either. To her left, Roberto sits on the hood, his back against the windshield and his laptop open on his lap. To her right, Loki lies on his back, legs over the edge of the roof, eyes fixed on the slowly darkening sky.

“She shouldn’t be going in there alone,” Claire says, for what must be the tenth time.

“She is the best choice,” Roberto reminds her.

“Yeah, because she’s the secretary’s type and because she can bench press a truck, I know, but she’s not bulletproof. If someone comes after her, they’re not gonna be unarmed. Not at the Avengers compound, and not when the damn Department of State is trying to take it over.”

Loki speaks up, with a vaguely annoyed lilt to his voice as he closes his eyes. “She willfully volunteered for this.”

“Yeah, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but self-preservation isn’t exactly Jessica’s _thing.”_

“Seems a common trait amongst humans.”

Roberto glances over his shoulder and, ignoring Loki’s jibe just as Claire does, he says, “They would have no reason to attack her.”

“She’s been on the news,” Claire reminds both of them. “Half of Hell’s Kitchen knows what she can do. What if Ross has a file on her somewhere?”

“I assure you, if this Secretary of yours has dealt with the likes of Banner’s beast and my brother,” Loki says, “someone who can ‘bench press a truck’ will have registered far, far beneath his radar.”

“Until she comes waltzing up to the compound with a creepy magic beacon in her pocket.”

“It’s not a _beacon,_ it’s—”

“A glamour, I know, you mentioned,” Claire says, pulling both hands through her hair. She lets out a sigh. “Look, I get that this part is necessary. I get it. It doesn’t mean I have to like it.”

She knows, technically, that Loki’s right. Technically, no one would have any reason to attack Jessica. She’s posing as a reporter, just another nosy member of the press that’s going to walk right in through the front door and talk to the guy at the desk. She’ll get in, ask a few questions, and get out. She’ll be brushed off as an inconvenience, and like Loki said, barely a blip on the Avengers’ radar. _Especially_ after everything that’s happened the last few days. Normal. Expected, even.

But she’s got a bobby pin in her pocket, a bobby pin that Loki magicked to look like a quarter.

They have to know, before they _really_ go in, whether Stark or the feds have some way of detecting the kind of magic Loki uses. Because if they do, this whole plan is dead in the water before it’s even been started. If they do, if an alarm is tripped, _then_ Jess might be in a little bit of trouble. But even then she can play dumb. They’ve seen her acting skills by now. Worst case scenario, they might attempt to detain her for tripping an alarm, but she’s got rights. It’s just a bobby pin. They wouldn’t be able to so much as keep her from walking right back out the door.

Claire sighs again. “This better be worth it.”

Loki, still lounging back on the roof with his eyes closed, says, “As I’ve said, if you prefer it I would be perfectly capable of entering the facility without any of your help.”

“And as _we’ve_ said, no, you sure as hell wouldn’t.”

At that, he opens his eyes, tilting his head just enough to raise an eyebrow at her, before he rolls his eyes and returns to gazing up toward the sky.

For lack of anything better to look at, Claire follows his gaze up; a few stars are just beginning to show as tiny pinpricks against the blue as twilight sets in. She’s really not used to being this far from the city. She’s not used to that very _small_ feeling that comes with looking up and getting the impression that she’s under a big blue dome, nothing between her and the open sky. Even this early, she can see a hell of a lot of stars. More than she’d ever see at home.

How many of those stars have other planets orbiting around them, she wonders? How many of those planets are filled with people mourning half of everyone they've ever known? The trillions of lives that were snapped out of existence by this Thanos guy, the _hundreds_ of trillions, was and still is way too much for her to wrap her head around.

It still weighs down on her, though. Still hurts like hell to think about.

She turns away from the stars and glances down at Loki again, only to find he hasn’t moved a muscle, his eyes still fixed upward.

And it occurs to her then, a bit out of nowhere, that he arrived here instantaneously — teleported, even though he objected to calling it that. Way faster than lightspeed. Can he still see Asgard from here? Is one of those little pinpricks of light _his_ planet, his and Thor's home, destined to wink out of the sky some day?

She doesn’t ask.

Instead she asks, “You really think these guys are gonna be able to fix all this?”

Loki seems to snap out of a haze with her question. He blinks, shakes his head like he’s shooing a fly, and then he sighs. “I honestly don’t know,” he admits, “but I am certain they’re going to try. At the very least, if there truly is no way to reverse it, I’m certain they’ll attempt to exact revenge on Thanos for what he’s done.”

And… well, _that's_ a crappy thought, isn't it?

The idea of not being able to reverse it makes her a little sick to her stomach, if she’s being honest, now that the alternate possibility has been presented. Avenging it sounds almost pointless in comparison.

“Huh,” is all she can think to say at first. Then, “Well at least the name would make a little more sense.”

To her surprise, when she glances down at Loki, she sees a half-smile on his face. “Indeed.”

“And I’m sure Jess wouldn’t mind punching this Thanos guy’s face in, if that ends up being the goal.”

“If she could reach his face.”

Claire snorts. “Don’t be a dick.”

“I’m serious,” Loki says, again raising an eyebrow as he casts a glance in her direction. “He’s roughly eight or nine feet tall. I tried to stab him in the throat and even I could barely reach it.”

“… Oh.”

Eight or nine feet tall. Shit.

For maybe the millionth time, she sweeps a quick look over Loki’s throat. It looks just about healed, at least externally, to the point that it’s impossible to see any bruising at all in this lighting. But the up close and personal look she'd gotten is seared in her brain, the mottled purple and black bruises, the swelling from below his collarbone all the way up past his jawline. She’d accidentally touched it, barely, when setting up that makeshift brace out of a towel, and he’d knocked her back ass-over-teakettle with his magic, _while_ he was unconscious. What kind of pain he must have been experiencing to be able to do that without conscious thought is… not something she wants to think about.

Thanos did that. One guy. An eight- or nine-foot-tall alien, with a fist that must be the size of a goddamn basketball, and a magic glove that can literally alter reality as she knows it. A guy who’s already gotten past _all_ the Avengers. Including Thor.

Claire runs a hand over her face, pulling her gaze away from his neck. She can’t stop picturing it now. A giant purple hand squeezing the life out of someone that’s survived the _Hulk._

She closes her eyes, gulps, and finds herself wishing in spite of everything that Luke was here. She’d be lying if she said she wasn’t. They could use a little of his nerve right about now, a little extra super-strength, never mind the benefit of having a bulletproof… friend, on their side.

Then she wonders if, had he survived the snap, she wouldn’t be wishing the exact opposite just to stop him from going up against this Thanos guy.

Claire shakes the thought away. No point in thinking about it now.

She turns to Loki and says, “You never answered Jessica’s question, you know.”

“Which one was that?” Loki asks, only sounding mildly curious. “You both asked quite a few.”

“If this guy got past all the Avengers _and_ Thor, what kind of difference do you think you’re gonna make?”

She watches him still staring up at the sky, or staring through it. Something shifts in his face, something that drives a crease into his forehead and pulls at the corners of his eyes. His frown deepens just a bit.

“As I’ve mentioned,” he says, carefully, “this is not the first time I’ve died.”

“You did mention that, yeah.”

Loki bites the inside of his cheek. “Yes, well. The short answer, I suppose, is that there are things I can do that none of the Avengers can.” As if to make a point, he lazily waves his hand, sending a few bright emerald sparks into the air, and they dance around each other like highly coordinated fireflies. “And if the Avengers, or what’s left of them, are to defeat Thanos in any capacity whatsoever, they will need all the help they can get.”

He lapses into a thoughtful silence for a second, and Claire asks, “And the long answer?”

There's a moment, again, in which he hesitates, chews on his cheek again. The far-off look in his eyes doesn't go away.

“Oh!” Roberto calls from the windshield. “There she is. She is on the grounds.”

_Shit._

Jessica.

Claire twists away from Loki, having already put the entire conversation nearly out of her mind, her heart already thudding like a drum.

On Roberto’s laptop screen, in the bottom left corner, a window shows the view from one of the hacked security cameras. Dimly lit fields and trees litter the foreground, bisected by a strip of black pavement that leads into the silver-tinted blob in the distance that must be the compound itself.

And there, striding along the pavement, is a familiar leather-clad figure with her hands stuffed into her pockets.

Loki doesn’t move from where he’s lying to see it. Claire and Roberto both sit, silently watching, eyes unwavering on the screen until Jess is little more than a fuzzy dot in the distance. Until she and the black-and-grey background are indistinguishable.

“She’s just about there,” Claire says.

Roberto nods. “There is nothing to do now but wait.”

“Shit,” Claire mutters, scrubbing her hands over her face.

Her nerves are driving her up a goddamn  _wall._ She turns away from the laptop screen, drops her chin onto her knee, stares out into the darkness between the oak trees. She tries not to imagine a bunch of federal agents pointing their guns at Jess, tries not to imagine what would come after. Jess is her friend by only the very loosest of definitions, but… well, maybe that definition got a little tighter with the annihilation of half the Universe. Whatever the reason, Claire can’t stomach the gruesome thoughts running through her head, can’t stomach the idea of Jess getting hurt or worse because of this mess.

She turns again, until it’s her cheek that rests on her knee and she can send Loki a look out of the corner of her eye. A look that he absolutely does not notice.

“Hey,” she says, tapping him in the thigh. She needs the distraction, so she asks again, “The long answer?”

Loki glances in her direction, then turns his eyes back toward the sky.

“Come on. Humor me,” she says.

 _You kind of owe me a little honesty, at the very least,_ she doesn’t say. Not out loud.

He takes in a slow inhale, lets out an even slower exhale. His Adam’s apple bobs as he gulps. “The truth is,” he says, “I won’t make much difference at all, not in the fight itself. For all my magic, it was never enough to defeat Thanos then — obviously.” He gestures with a vague wave toward his own throat. “And it won’t be enough to defeat him now. It’s certainly true that they will need all the help they can get, but it’s also true that my power is little more than a drop in an ocean compared with Thor’s and the Hulk’s.”

She waits as he lapses into silence again. He folds his hands over his stomach.

“I’ve died before,” he continues. “Or near enough as to make no difference, and _before,_ I had no reason to think my death would have much consequence.”

Claire raises a skeptical eyebrow. “And you do now?”

He shrugs one shoulder. “There is one thing I know for certain. My brother is the best chance any of us has at defeating Thanos. I don’t merely say that as his brother, it’s simple fact. And in the past, Thor has gone on to do… many a great thing after my passing. Grand acts of heroism, all the great triumphs that have driven half of this planet to _fawning_ over him day in and day out. Losing a brother is… unfortunate, I’m sure, but he thrives in the face of hardship. Always has.”

“And you don’t think he’ll do that this time.”

“He already hasn’t,” Loki answers, a note of bitterness in his voice. “He was defeated. And, if this Secretary is to be believed, he willingly submitted to some sort of ridiculous captivity not long after, when there’s vengeance to be had. That’s not —” his voice cuts off, and he gulps again. “That’s not Thor.”

“So, what’s different this time?”

Yet again, Loki hesitates. He opens his mouth, closes it, mulls over his words for a bit.

“What’s different this time,” he finally says, “is that I’m not all he’s lost. And it… _does_ something to a person, having nothing left to lose.”

And Claire has to admit, there’s some wisdom in that.

She can’t help noticing the way he says it, too, like he knows _just_ what having nothing left to lose does to a person, like he knows exactly what it looks like when an Asgardian hits rock bottom. Maybe it looks the same as it would for a human, Claire thinks. Self-destructive tendencies and mood swings and depressive episodes. Or maybe it looks like something else entirely, like going berserk and trying to take over Midtown with an army of flying monsters.

Not that she’s making excuses for him. Not even close.

But, well, if that’s what it looks like when this guy hits rock bottom, she doesn’t want to think about what it might look like when Thor does.

Claire blows out a breath, puffing out her cheeks. “Well, if —”

“Uh,” Roberto cuts in, a slight waver in his voice. “Claire…?”

She blinks, turning to shoot a furtive look at his computer — there’s a line of code in the one window that’s blinking in red, though she has no idea what that might mean — and then turns her gaze up to him. “What?” she asks. “What is it?”

The answer comes half a second later.

In the bottom left corner of his screen, there’s a brief flash of red light, hardly larger than a pinprick. It disappears and flashes again, and Claire blinks with wide eyes until the shape starts to make itself clearer.

The windows of the compound. There’s an intermittent flash coming from inside the compound, washing the windows in a hazy red light.

An alarm.

_Fuck._

Behind her, finally, Loki starts to sit up. She hears him murmur a faintly surprised, “So they _were_ able to detect it,” but she can barely register that. She can barely register anything past the blood rushing by her ears.

“Can we get her out of there?”

“She planned for this, remember?” Loki reminds her, letting out an annoyed sigh as he lays back down against the roof. “She’ll feign ignorance and be on her way back here soon. Inconvenient, though. I’m not sure how I’ll —”

His disaffected monologue is brought to a halt, though, and this time it’s not thanks to Roberto or an alarm on his computer.

This time it’s Claire’s ringtone.

She jumps, fumbling to pull the phone out of her pocket for a moment, and the second she sees the name on the screen she hastens to swipe up and put the phone to her ear.

“Jess? Are you—?”

“Hey,” Jessica cuts her off from the other end of the line. “Change of plans.”

She sounds out of breath. Somewhere in the background, Claire hears the indistinct commotion of… voices? She can’t tell how many, maybe two or three. Then there’s the _screech_ of what can only be something metal being bent in a way it’s not supposed to bend, and —

“What?” Claire asks, shaking her head. “What the _hell_ do you mean, change of plans?”

“Start getting to the compound. Fast.”

“What—?!”

“Have our friendly neighborhood demigod teleport you there if you have to.”

Beside her, Loki is sitting up again, and he’s leaning in to try and hear what Jess is saying. Claire swats him out of her personal space and switches the call over to speaker so all three of them can hear.

“Jess, what the hell is going on?”

 _“Ugh,_ just — hang on a sec.”

Another screech, shorter but way louder than the first. A  _pop._ One of the voices in the background jumps in volume, but Claire still can’t make out what they’re saying. Like the voices are muffled somehow.

“There,” Jess pants. “Cool. Okay, so. Remember how we said they might be able to tell if someone’s pulling some magic bullshit in the compound? Turns out they can.”

“We know,” Roberto says, at the same time that Claire tells her, “You were supposed to _leave_ after that.”

“Yeah, well, they weren’t buying it. Had to think on my feet, hence, change of plans.”

“And that plan is us running in there, guns blazing?” Claire asks. “That’s a terrible plan, Jess.”

“Not really. Look, just…” Jess pauses, lets out a puff like she hasn’t quite caught her breath yet. “I still have the bobby pin on me. If you guys get here _right now,_ you won’t trip the alarm since it’s already going off.”

“And I’m sure Ross is just letting you sit around in the lobby until we get there,” Claire mutters, pinching the bridge of her nose. “Jess, where the hell _are_ you?”

“Uh, in the… Southern elevator shaft? Could be the Eastern one. Lost track.”

“The _elevator shaft?”_

“Yeah. Broke the door. I give ‘em fifteen minutes to pry that shit out of the way the old-fashioned way, or five minutes if they let someone out of lock-up to do it for them.” She lets out a huff, this time sounding less exhausted and more annoyed. “So, you wanna start getting here any time soon? Or are you just gonna wait til Captain America’s elbow deep in my —”

There’s a bright flash like emerald stars burning little blots into her retinas, and Jess’s voice drops away to nothing.

As does, it seems, everything else.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [shows up 4 months late with starbucks] i TOLD y'all i wasn't abandoning it, didn't i?
> 
> my only excuse is that i got distracted by a new hyperfixation and wrote (and am still writing) a metric fuckton of fic for another fandom but i'm BACK
> 
> in all seriousness though, this chapter gave me a lot of trouble until i suddenly got inspiration a few days ago and banged out 11k words in like, three sittings. but you know what that means??? yeah! the next (last) chapter is already written, and once i edit and post it this entire fic is FINALLY gonna be done! complete! finito! [david tennant voice] can i hear a _wahoo?_
> 
> (that also means i didn't do quite as extensive editing as usual, so kindly lemme if there's any typos)
> 
> enjoy, my dears

 

Claire expects something more.

As soon as she realizes what’s happened, what Loki’s done, she expects reality to warp and bend around her, she expects to feel like her entire body’s been compressed and twisted through a pinhole, she expects the ground to rush up to meet her feet with dizzying swiftness. In all honesty, she expects to throw up the second they land, all over Loki’s funky Asgardian clothes. It’d serve him right, anyway.

None of that happens.

One moment she’s tense and perched on the roof of her mom’s van, and the next she’s just… not. The transition is half a heartbeat long, recognizable only by that burst of light, like someone pressed a clear green film to the flash of a camera and aimed it right at her face before she had the chance to blink.

She still stumbles through the transition from sitting to standing, one hand flying out to grab the nearest available object — which happens to be Loki’s upper arm — in a veritable death grip, hard enough that it’d bruise anyone else. In her other hand she still clutches her phone, though judging by the dead silence around them the connection wasn’t quite able to keep up with the instantaneous travel.

But there’s no queasiness. No stomach-turning sensation of spacetime bending around her.

 _Still,_ though—

“What the hell did I say,” she groans, blinking away the blots of emerald that seem seared into her retinas, “about giving me a little warning next time, huh?”

“To give you one,” comes the response, quiet and distracted. “Apologies. Time seemed of the essence.”

“Yeah. Right.” Claire shakes her head, as the black and gray and bright searing green finally dulls down and begins to resemble… trees, and grass, and a strip of asphalt path beneath her feet. Beneath _their_ feet. She doesn’t let go of his arm just yet.

In the distance, red light flares at intervals in what must be the windows of the compound. Wind whistles through the leaves above them. Somewhere there are frogs croaking, and crickets chirping, which is almost more disorienting than the teleportation was — the idea that normal, everyday sounds like that can still be happening at a time like this.

Her phone buzzes in her free hand, and she jumps, muttering a curse under her breath before coming to her senses and waking the screen.

It’s a text from Roberto.

_[ 2 agents, ur 10 oclock ]_

“Shit,” she breathes, turning in that direction just as she hears the faint telltale sound of footfalls on asphalt. She whispers, “Loki, we’ve gotta get—”

“Agents,” he cuts her off, his voice very much _not_ his, a voice she’s only ever heard on TV before now, and Claire’s eyes widen as her gaze trails up the arm she’s still got in a death grip, right up to a face that is _also_ very much not his.

The agents round the corner around a thicket of trees and come into view, but she barely pays attention to them.

Because she knew, objectively, that Loki could make himself look like someone else. She caught a glimpse of that much earlier in the van, but God, it’s so viscerally real that it takes her a second to remember that it isn’t. Her brain just keeps telling her that _this guy is Tony Stark,_ his profile exactly as she’s seen in the pictures, the purposefully tousled salt-and-pepper hair and the signature goatee and mustache, his crows feet showing even in this dim lighting as he flashes a perfect million-dollar white smile.

He’s not wearing an Armani suit like the magazines, though. Instead he’s wearing, of all things, a Black Sabbath t-shirt.

And how the hell does Loki even know what Black Sabbath _is?_

Now’s definitely not the time to ask. The two agents halt in their tracks, blinking wide eyes at this sudden new arrival on the grounds. Both of them are dressed head to toe in full combat gear, toting some serious firepower — AK-47s maybe, but she honestly has no idea. Definitely semi-automatics. Claire watches as their eyes fix on the magic illusion of Tony Stark and their jaws drop. The agent on the right takes a hesitant step back, his brow furrowed.

Never once do either of their shocked gazes stray to her.

“Sorry,” Tony Stark says, loud and charming and with a mischievous glint to his smile. “Didn’t mean to drop in without an announcement. Would’ve sent a postcard or something, but.”

He shrugs, all careless and casual, but the movement is strong enough that it shakes Claire’s hand off of him.

One of the two agents, the one on the left, hefts his gun a little higher, though he doesn’t aim it. He doesn’t even click off the safety. He just looks… confused, at a loss.

“Mr. Stark?”

“Good eyes, yeah.”

Claire steps away from him, her eyes unwavering on the two agents. Neither of them seem to notice her move, which is either _really_ rude, or…

Slowly, carefully, she steps entirely into their view of the Tony Stark doppelgänger, stands on her tip-toes so she completely obscures him, so that they would have no choice but to acknowledge her if she were visible to them at all.

And she might as well not be there.

“You’re supposed to be dead,” says the agent on the right.

“I was, for a bit. Don’t recommend it.”

She closes the distance between them in a few quick strides. The one on the left is clenching and unclenching his jaw, grip tight on his weapon. He’s nearly six feet of lean muscle, young, looks a little twitchy. The one on the right is a little bigger but shorter, a little broader in the shoulders, a decade or two older, which means maybe — hopefully — a little slower. He’s only got one hand on his gun.

“Who else is home?” Tony Stark asks. “Cap around?”

The agent on the left, the young one, frowns and opens his mouth to answer.

And he promptly chokes on nothing and doubles over, courtesy of Claire’s fist dealing a swift punch to his Adam’s apple.

She keeps the other agent in her peripheral — he spits out a curse, backpedals, hefts up his gun, looking wildly back and forth from the younger agent to where Loki’s standing — and Claire brings her knee up into the younger one’s groin with all the strength she’s got, ducks around behind him, and drives her elbow into his lower back. He goes down to his knees and collapses like a sack of potatoes, hunched over and groaning out choked half-syllables with one hand over his throat.

“Davis, what—?” the other agent begins to ask, and then he glances up toward not-Tony-Stark and jumps. _“Fuck,_ where the hell—?”

By now he’s clicked off the safety on his gun, and that’s the only reason Claire doesn’t charge at him, too. One lucky shot on his part and she’s done for.

When she follows the agent’s gaze back where the fake Tony Stark had been only moments ago, now there’s nothing but empty pavement and trees. The agent stares down the sight of his gun, turning in a slow circle and only sparing a nervous fleeting glance at the ground where the other agent is still moaning and trying to regain his bearings.

“Fucking magic,” the agent mutters under his breath, and Claire doesn’t dare move. “Where the hell are you…?”

There’s a shimmer of green over his shoulder, and Loki, looking every bit like himself again, appears out of thin air with his hands behind his back and a smile on his face. He leans forward, close enough to whisper in the agent’s ear.

“Boo.”

The agent shouts, whirling around to face his attacker, the semi-automatic swinging in a wide arc, no doubt intended to fill Loki with bullets first and ask questions never.

And the fight — well, the fight is over so quickly that it’s almost funny to watch. Almost. Except it’s also a little bit scary. Loki lifts one hand and catches the gun by the end of its barrel, and a quick tug is all it takes to rip the weapon out of the agent’s hands.

In the next instant Loki’s already jabbed the butt of the rifle into the agent’s forehead.

 _“Shit,_ Loki—!” Claire hisses as the agent crumples in a heap, unconscious before he hits the ground. She scrambles to his side and drops to one knee, pressing two fingers below his jaw.

“What? You gave the other agent far worse treatment.”

“Yeah,” she says, still annoyed despite the relief as a pulse beats beneath her fingers, “but I’m not strong enough to kill him with one hit.”

She’d bet just about anything on him waking up with a concussion in a few hours, but at least he _will_ wake up. She sighs, rising to her feet and dusting off her legs, just in time to see Loki crouching beside the other agent. He presses a hand to the back of the agent’s head, and the green light of his magic seems to envelope the guy’s entire skull.

When he pulls his hand back, that agent’s out cold, too.

“What did you do?”

“He’s just sleeping,” Loki answers, rolling his eyes.

 _Relax, silly human,_ his face seems to say, like she should know better than to expect anything else from a guy with a long history of lethal use of force.

She should have expected this, really. She saw the video, after all, the one that went viral back in 2012, the one of him fighting against Captain America in Germany. It had been the most watched video on YouTube for _months,_ because people couldn’t believe there was someone who could go toe to toe with Steve “I Could Fist Fight a Tank and Win” Rogers and almost _beat_ him.

And the agents and guards standing between them and Thor right now are decidedly less durable than Captain America is.

“You’re gonna have to be more careful. Humans are fragile,” she adds. “Blunt force trauma is a thing. A _lethal_ thing.”

Loki lets out a long suffering sigh. “Yes, yes, of course.”

As he moves to stand, there’s a very noticeable wince and a hitch in his breath, and Claire’s brow creases. Did he look that pale when they were back at the van? He looks pasty white again, even in this dim lighting. He seems to half-stumble on his way up, too, bringing a thumb to press at his temple like he’s got a bad migraine.

She frowns. For a guy who just beat a trained agent in hand-to-hand combat in three seconds flat, he sure looks ready to collapse right here on the ground next to both of them.

“Hey. You good?”

A low groan sounds from the back of his throat. “I’m fine,” he mutters, shaking his head. Then he adds something else under his breath, something that sounds like… nothing in English.

“What was that?” Claire asks, taking a step closer so that she can sweep a scrutinizing look over her former patient. She reaches up and snaps her fingers in front of his face. “Hey. Loki. You good?”

 _“Mœði,”_ he repeats, then shakes his head again, until the far-off look in his eyes dissipates and some color returns to his face. He starts to look like himself again. His normal, obstinate, pain-in-the-ass self. “I’m _fine.”_

“You’re sure.”

He nods distractedly, nose wrinkling as he stares off toward the compound. “Instantaneous travel can be draining. Magic’s not quite” — he waves a hand over his head — “not quite _there_ yet. I’m… I’ll be fine.”

Before she gets to say anything to that except for raise a skeptical eyebrow at him, he rolls his shoulders and, in another ripple of magic light, transforms into the agent he just knocked out with his own gun. Then he crouches down again, looking over the _actual_ agent, and when he speaks it’s his own voice that comes forth from the doppelgänger agent’s mouth.

“You seem rather preoccupied with the well-being of these men,” he says, pulling the walkie-talkie from the agent’s belt and snapping it in half. “You know they would have killed you without a second thought, given the chance.”

“Maybe,” Claire answers, crossing her arms. “Doesn’t mean I want them dead. Doesn’t mean they deserve to die.”

“That is naiveté of _mind boggling_ proportions.”

She narrows her eyes, watching as he pulls the pistol from the agent’s holster and bends that in half with a grunt of effort before tossing it aside, and she says, “You know if it wasn’t for that so-called _naiveté_ you wouldn’t be alive right now, either, right?”

He pauses, opens his mouth, and gives a little tilt of his head. “Fair point.”

“So we’re agreed then. No killing.”

“I wasn’t planning on it, no,” Loki answers. He picks up the semi-automatic, turns it over as he inspects it, and tosses it carelessly over his shoulder.

“You don’t want that?” Claire asks.

“It’ll only get in my way,” he answers offhandedly. “Especially if I’m to avoid killing. Why? Do you want it?”

Claire shrugs, but the next thing she knows the semi-automatic is being lobbed into the air in her direction. She blinks, hastily catching it against her chest — at least he had the common sense to click the safety back on. Loki claps some imaginary dust from his hands as he moves to stand, and he glances down at the younger agent, who’s actually begun _snoring_ at this point. With his foot he nudges that agent’s walkie-talkie off of his belt and stomps on it. Then he stomps on the other semi-automatic, too, so that the barrel is bent at an odd angle, definitely useless now.

“That should do it, I think,” he says, and his voice morphs into that of the agent’s mid-sentence. It drops an octave, takes on a sort of aged scratchiness to it, loses the Shakespearean accent.

Claire blinks, and a bit more of that greenish light seems to flicker and flare on the outskirts of her vision, tinting everything in a lighter emerald glow. Just for a second.

When it clears, she feels… taller, bigger.

The agent who isn’t really an agent smiles at her and waves in the direction of the compound. “Shall we move on, then, Agent Davis?”

It’s not an illusion, she realizes — he’s actually _shapeshifted_ her entire body, morphed her into the image of Agent Davis. Holy shit, he can _do_ that? Claire rolls her shoulders, everything from the bulk of her arms to the length of her torso entirely unfamiliar. She tilts her head from side to side, and an audible crack resounds from her neck.

The agent’s voice comes from her mouth when she speaks.

“Uh, yeah. Right. Let’s go.”

Loki is already way ahead of her, marching off purposefully toward the compound, but given the extra foot or so added onto Claire’s stride, it’s not all that difficult to catch up.

“Thanks for giving me the stronger agent, I guess,” she says, falling into step beside him.

“Oh,” the other agent says in a tone like he’s forgotten something. “Right. Don’t let the added musculature fool you, you’re exactly the same level of strength you’d have been otherwise.”

“Seriously? I swear I feel stronger.”

“You feel _larger,”_ Loki corrects her. “Shapeshifting alters form, not substance. Why would I have shapeshifted into a human otherwise?”

“… Huh.”

She had actually assumed his own disguise was an illusion, but it feels a little pointless arguing semantics of magic with a magic-wielding demigod several times her age.

“Yes, it was a rude awakening when I first discovered that pesky little rule, too,” he adds offhand, and he holds up the agent’s thumb and forefinger about six inches apart. “Shapeshifted Thor into a frog for a bit of fun some… five, six centuries ago? I’d assumed he’d lose all of his strength. Also assumed he’d be incapable of wielding Mjolnir. I was wrong on both accounts.”

Claire almost snorts at the image _that_ brings to mind. “Could he do the whole lightning thing, too?”

The agent’s face pulls into a grimace. “Unfortunately.”

As they approach the compound, another pair of agents goes marching past them in the opposite direction. Claire offers them both a tight-lipped smile and a nod as they pass. Loki keeps his eyes straight ahead.

“You know,” Claire says, “that might actually be the most normal thing I’ve ever heard from you.”

“That I once used ancient magic to turn the God of Thunder into a frog and was subsequently electrocuted by it? Funny, I’d been under the impression that was not ‘normal’ by Midgardian standards.”

“Not the magic bit,” Claire admits. “Just the messing with your brother part.”

It’s almost nice, she thinks. In a universe with magic and not-quite-Gods and aliens that can wipe out half of all life with a single snap of their fingers, in a universe that Claire thinks she understands less and less with each passing day, it’s some small comfort to know that there are still a few constants. No matter what planet you’re on, brothers still bicker.

Of course, all thoughts of bickering brothers and constants of the universe go _right_ out of her head the second they clear the entrance into the Avengers facility.

Because there, not ten feet away and with his eyes already on them the second they step inside, is the goddamn Secretary of State.

_Shit._

There’s some commotion of voices from somewhere off to the left, somewhere they can’t see, but Thaddeus Ross doesn’t acknowledge that — probably because he’s already been briefed on exactly what’s going on, probably because he already knows _exactly_ what kind of trouble Jess is causing — and instead he eyes Claire and Loki down, his hands behind his back.

“Davis,” Ross says to Claire with a nod. Then to Loki, “Henderson.”

“Mr. Secretary,” Claire answers without hesitation, straightening her back and returning the nod. Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Loki follow suit.

Ross narrows his eyes, sweeping a look over Claire before his gaze settles on Loki. And maybe it’s because she’s standing so close to him, but Claire _swears_ she feels that strange crackling feeling from before, the tension in the air that hangs around Loki when he’s prepared for a fight.

“Henderson,” Ross says, his brows knitting together. “Where’s your firearm?”

 

* * *

 

This is, without doubt, the _stupidest_ fucking thing that Jess has ever done.

The heels of her boots are dug into the paneling that makes up the side of the elevator shaft, about two or three inches of metal for her to balance on, her back pressed to the mangled wreck she’s left of the elevator door, twenty feet of nothing but air between her soles and the basement floor below.

About ten feet above her head, the elevator car blocks her access to the uppermost floors, unless she wants to beat her way through it — but her knuckles are already throbbing, so that’s a hard goddamn pass. She’s already driven her fist into the electric motor that operates the whole thing, so she at least doesn’t have to worry about the car coming down on top of her, or any of Ross’s asshole agents accessing the shaft from above.

Their voices are muffled a bit through the metal, but she can hear them behind her. Three agents or guards or whatever they are, plus the secretary from the front desk who’d been all too eager to call for backup as soon as the alarm was tripped.

“Can’t get it open—”

There’s a grunt, something hitting the metal with a _clang._

“Fuck, man, what did she do to it?”

“Where the hell is Ross? He should already be here.”

“I don’t know—”

“Well go find him.”

“What about Rogers?”

“What _about_ Rogers? Just go get Ross and let him deal with—”

Whatever. She’s not sticking around to wait until they pull their heads out of their asses.

Jess braces herself and jumps down from the door. A shock of pain ripples its way up her shins when her feet hit the ground, but she shakes it off. At least she landed on her feet. She pulls out her phone, types a quick text to Roberto — _hey, send me that blueprint?_ — and the text pings for half a second before it comes right back as _failed to send._

She rolls her eyes and tucks the phone into her back pocket. Stupid elevator shaft fucking up her signal.

“Old-fashioned way, I guess,” she mutters.

From the bottom of the elevator shaft, she can see she’s got three options. There’s another elevator door directly behind her about two or three feet off the ground, which must lead to a basement level, and given Jessica’s complete lack of information she’s gonna go ahead and _not_ throw herself into an open floor where there’s bound to be at least one person she doesn’t want to run into.

The other two options are the air vents, one on her right, one on her left. Without wasting any more time, Jess rips both vents out of the wall to throw off anyone who might try to track where she’s gone, and she clambers up into the left vent. Thank God for having a tiny frame, at least. She seriously doubts most of Ross’ agents could get up here to follow her, much less Captain America and his giant bodybuilder shoulders.

All she has to do is stay hidden. Stay in the compound, keep on the move, make sure everyone keeps thinking that the alarms blaring fucking _everywhere_ are because of her, and preferably also avoid security.

… In the most secure facility north of Washington.

With armed guards crawling all over the place.

Plus a few guys that are _at least_ as strong as she is, if not many times stronger.

“Fan-fucking-tastic,” Jess mutters, rolling her eyes as she army crawls through the ventilation shaft. “Should be a piece of cake.”

 

* * *

 

“What is _wrong_ with you?!”

“Well, if you must know, I’ve still not quite recovered from being dead, I’ve got a bit of a headache, I’m—”

“I was referring to _this,”_ Claire hisses through gritted teeth, struggling to keep her — or Agent Davis’ — voice down, “and you goddamn know it, you _asshole.”_

“What?” Loki asks, turning to raise an eyebrow at her like he genuinely does not understand why she’s got a problem with any of this. With one hand he continues adjusting the _very unconscious_ Secretary of State so that all his arms and legs will fit into the front lobby storage closet. “I agree it’s not ideal. I’d transport him somewhere else, of course, but it’s taking rather a lot of focus to maintain these disguises as it is, and…”

Claire levels him with a glare, clenching her — the agent’s — jaw, and surprisingly enough Loki gives in and stops pretending he doesn’t know what she’s talking about.

“Yes, yes, alright,” he says with a roll of his eyes. _“Fine._ I will stop causing blunt force trauma in every human that crosses our path. Happy?”

“No! No, I am not happy,” Claire bites back, leaning in with her arms crossed as Loki carefully shuts the storage closet door. “That was the _goddamn Secretary of State_ you just attacked. Someone is going to notice he’s missing, or they’ve already seen you attacking him on the security footage, and they’ll be—”

“They won’t have seen it on the cameras, I made sure of it,” Loki dismisses, and then he points at the closet door. “That was Secretary Ross?”

“Yes!”

“You’re certain.”

 _“Obviously_ I’m certain, and you—!”

“Well, why didn’t you say so?” Loki asks.

A green shimmer takes him over from head to toe, and not a moment later Claire finds herself glaring angrily at Secretary Thaddeus Ross, exactly as he’d looked just moments ago — except of course for the fact that he’s upright, and fully conscious, and lacking the bruised lump on his forehead.

“Ta-da.” He flashes a smile under that ridiculous mustache. “What do you think?”

She glares harder. “I _think_ you’re giving me agita.”

“Oh, come now,” he says, which sounds absolutely ridiculous in an American accent. Taking the form of Secretary Ross has tacked on about five inches to his height, so that Loki once again can look down at her, and it somehow makes him look _several_ times more condescending than usual. Claire isn’t sure if that’s an effect of Loki’s attitude or Ross’ face. “I’ve already promised not to attack anyone else, haven’t I?”

“Yeah, yeah, whatever,” she mutters, shaking her head and pulling out her phone to take a look at the blueprint of the facility again. It’s still entirely unlabelled except for a few little numbers on the rooms, numbers that mean absolutely nothing to her. “Let’s just get going. If we’re gonna be arrested and put in some deep underground government prison for the rest of our lives, let’s at least try to make it worth something.”

“The rest of _your_ life, perhaps,” Loki adds as they start winding their way through the facility’s inner halls.

“Not better, thanks.”

He huffs, then rolls his eyes. “You won’t be arrested anyway.”

Claire snorts, glancing up from the blueprint on her phone to compare it to the line of sleek metal doors and the multitude of turns this hallway branches off into. “You sure about that?”

Out of the corner of her eye, she sees him nod. “Nor will your little friend, wherever she’s gotten off to. Or the boy, back at the car. It will be all too easy to pass off any crimes committed here as my own, and anyone who would arrest any of _you_ would likely assume you were acting under my control.”

“Your control, huh?”

He shrugs. “It would hardly be the first time.”

A group of agents jogs past them toward the front lobby, probably heading off toward the elevator Jess has barricaded herself in, and Claire spares a quick prayer to whoever might be listening that no one gets to her before Claire and Loki do. Assuming she and Loki _do_ get to Jess at all.

One benefit of Loki looking like Secretary Ross, though: Everyone gives them a _very_ wide berth and barely spares either of them a passing glance.

“Okay,” she says, searching the blueprint again as the agents’ pounding footsteps fades into the distance. “If there’s some kind of containment facility around here, it’s gotta be in the basement, right? That’s our best bet. Stairs are… that way. Last door on the right.”

She points, tucking the phone back into her pocket, and without a word Loki starts striding off in that direction with Claire following close at his heels.

They’ve made it about five steps before someone else enters the hallway, rounding a corner from the left, and Claire’s heart sinks into her stomach. On instinct she wants to freeze in her tracks, but somehow she keeps her steps even, trailing behind Loki-as-Secretary-Ross while trying to appear as unassuming as possible.

Loki, apparently, seems to have the same idea, though Claire definitely sees his shoulders tense up from behind.

“Mr. Secretary.”

“Agent Romanoff,” Loki says with a stiff nod.

 _Keep walking, keep walking,_ Claire thinks, hoping against hope that she’ll suddenly gain some kind of telepathic power and the Black Widow will keep walking down the hall and away from them. She’s got bigger concerns right now, right? Surely she’ll keep running off to wherever she’d been heading.

The Black Widow stops in her tracks, eyeing Ross with a frown.

 _Fuck,_ Claire thinks. _Fuckity fuck. Goddammit. Shit._

She’s really starting to regret telling Loki not to cause blunt force trauma to anyone else. An actual Avenger definitely counts as an exception in Claire’s book, but she’s not entirely sure Loki will know that.

“Shouldn’t you be in the East Wing, Mr. Secretary?” Romanoff asks, and her gaze flicks to Claire before settling back on Loki. Her right hand rests on the holster at her waist, casual and relaxed, like she doesn’t _quite_ expect a need to draw her weapon but she’s more than prepared for the possibility.

Loki straightens his back. “I fail to see how that’s your business.”

Her eyes narrow for half a second, and then she raises her eyebrows. “Fair enough,” she says, offering a smile that’s sickly sweet and placating. “Just thought a breach like this fell under your jurisdiction, is all.”

“Right,” Loki says, blunt and annoyed. He’s at least got the right mannerisms down, Claire thinks, and impressively so for someone that only saw the real guy for about fifteen seconds before knocking him out cold. “My agents in the East Wing have it handled. You’d do well to stand down, Agent Romanoff.”

Her eyes remain unwavering on his, her face all but entirely unreadable. The small smile is somehow all at once demure and beautiful and blood-chilling, and suddenly Claire thinks she understands why a person with no superpowers to speak of is part of a team that involves supersoldiers and literal Gods.

Then, finally, the Black Widow says, “The breach is in the _South_ Wing, Mr. Secretary.”

Loki freezes for half a beat, and half a beat is, evidently, all the Black Widow needs.

The pistol is out of her holster before Claire can _blink,_ and Loki backs up a step and raises his hands in surrender as she levels the barrel at his head. Claire backpedals, not bothering to hide the fear and shock on her face as she hefts up the agent’s semi-automatic — only to find that the Black Widow has already aimed a second pistol at her head, too, before Claire could so much as click off the safety.

“Stand down, Agent Davis,” Romanoff says, calm as ever and with her eyes still on Loki. “This isn’t Secretary Ross.”

_“What?”_

“Isn’t that right?” Romanoff asks, ignoring Claire’s outburst as she smiles again at Loki.

For his part, Loki maintains a look of dispassionate anger for a few seconds before he gives in, and the cold smile that cuts through his face his so _unlike_ Ross that it’s almost startling. Romanoff, though, seems unaffected. If anything she looks like a predator that’s finally caught its prey, heartened by the confirmation that she was right and that she’s got the impersonator in her sights.

“Good work, Agent Romanoff,” Loki says.

And then he winks and disappears in a shimmer of green light.

Claire blinks wide eyes at the space where he’d just been standing, an utterly empty hallway, no Loki or Secretary Ross to be seen anywhere. Did he seriously just leave her here? With an actual Avenger? With a _gun pointed at her head—?!_

“Shit,” Romanoff hisses, holstering her pistols again, and she speaks into a communicator in her wrist. “Steve, someone’s impersonating Secretary Ross. I could be wrong, but it looked like Loki’s magic.”

The response comes back almost immediately. _“Nat, Loki’s supposed to be dead.”_

“Yeah, well,” she says with a shrug. “Either he’s not dead, or someone’s putting a whole lot of effort into making this whole thing look like him. Where’s Thor?”

_“Still downstairs, 011. Should I—?”_

“No,” she answers right away. “He’s…”

A strange emotion flits across her face, and she shakes her head.

“I want to know exactly who’s doing this before we get him involved.”

_“Yeah. Good call.”_

“Check around the basement levels anyway. He might be headed there. I’ve got the first floor covered.” She lowers her arm, finally devoting her full attention to Claire and giving her a once over. “Was Ross acting strange at all before just now, Agent Davis?”

“I — uh, no,” Claire answers. “I don’t… think so?”

Romanoff nods. “And how long were you with him?”

Claire gulps, hoping her nervousness comes across as the remnants of shock. “Not long,” she answers. “About ten minutes.”

“Did he say where the two of you were headed?”

Claire shakes her head. She’s not stupid enough to try lying _out loud_ to the Black Widow.

“Alright,” Romanoff says, and she points down the hall, alarmingly friendly and gentle given the predatory grin she’d been wearing moments before. “Head to the South Wing. Make sure everyone’s briefed on the situation and keep your eyes peeled, okay?”

“Yes, Ma’am,” Claire all but squeaks, nodding vigorously as she turns on her heel before Romanoff can ask her anything else. Her heart pounds in her ears as she hurries off toward… wherever the South Wing is. Shit. Probably wherever all the commotion’s coming from, right? Probably the elevator Jess busted into. Yeah. Sure. Claire can just follow the noise. Easy.

God, she is going to _kill_ Loki when she finds him again. She is going to murder him with her bare hands, wherever the hell he is.

It’s not until she rounds the corner and finally gets out of the Black Widow’s sight, not until the adrenaline drops down a notch and leaves her arms feeling like jelly and her mind just a _little_ bit more clear, that she realizes she knows exactly where he is. Or she knows exactly where he’s _going_ to be, anyway.

She pulls her phone out again, zooming in on the blueprint. The little numbers typed into the corner of each room had meant nothing to her before, and for the most part, they still do.

Except for one. She taps her finger to the room labelled _011_ on the basement level, feeling the strangest combination of being almost comically in way over her head and of _finally_ feeling like she’s got a handle on the situation.

“Alright,” she breathes. “Room 011, here I come.”

 


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> today i learned: mark ruffalo is 5’8”, so he’s only an inch taller than rosario dawson (claire temple) and an inch _shorter_ than krysten ritter (jessica jones), and if that isn’t the greatest result i’ve ever gotten from googling actor heights for fic-writing reasons idk what is
> 
> now, here's the end, folks! keep in mind, as i said at the beginning, this will have a sort of open ending since i'm not even thinking about the whole..... thanos thing lmao
> 
> enjoy! and thank you again to everyone that's stuck around this long!

 

Jess isn’t sure what’s more ridiculous.

Is it the fact that she’s crawling through air vents in the basement level of the Avengers facility in the first place, in the middle of a red alert that _she_ caused? Is it the fact that she thought, somehow, that she’d be able to stay hidden in the air vents like this is some kind of cheap heist movie?

No, she thinks. The most ridiculous thing is probably the fact that it’s not an Avenger or one of those idiot agents that finds her in the air vents.

No. Her luck is too goddamn awful even for _that._

But what the hell is a _fucking raccoon_ doing in the ventilation system?

Jess stays frozen right where she is, not daring to make a move. This is insane. She’d heard someone, somewhere, in the ventilation shaft just a few seconds ago. She’d heard a voice angrily muttering something about “— _more important shit to do—”_ and _“—not my fault I’m the only one that can fit—”_ and _“—don’t see why we can’t just flush the damn vents—”_ and then she’d come across a raccoon scurrying through the vents before she could figure out where the voice was coming from.

And now she’s gonna get fucking rabies _and_ blow her goddamn cover.

The raccoon bares its teeth, and then—

“Gotcha.”

Jessica’s thoughts grind to a halt. Her eyes blow wider than ever, and for one crazy moment she thinks she’s hallucinating. Fumes in the air vents, right? Because there’s no way—

“Stay still, humie,” the raccoon says in the exact same voice she’d heard echoing through the ventilation shaft earlier, and no, she is definitely really seeing this. She knows what a hallucination feels like, and this isn’t it.

This is really happening. This is her real goddamn life right now.

 _A talking raccoon,_ she thinks. The thing’s even wearing clothes, now that she’s gotten a good look. _Yeah. Cool. Sure. Why the hell not?_

It starts fumbling with its front legs — arms? — to grab something clipped to the belt at its waist, and Jess glances down at the vent below her. She can’t see much of the room it leads to, but she’s not about to get in a fight with a fucking _raccoon,_ talking and fully clothed or not. It could totally still have rabies.

Yeah. No fucking thanks.

She wriggles her fingers through the slats in the vent.

“Hey,” the raccoon says, its voice low with warning, “don’t even think about—!”

Jess yanks the vent up in one quick movement. There’s the _snap_ of the bolts popping out, the _screech_ of metal tearing as she rips up the vent itself and a solid two or three square feet of the ventilation shaft along with it. She shoves all of it forward, right at the raccoon so that it’s forced to scramble back with a shout — a _way_ too human-sounding shout, holy shit, this is really happening, just when she thought all this Avengers bullshit couldn’t get any weirder — and a second later the entire ventilation shaft is blocked up.

Jess ignores the raccoon’s angry cursing and shouting, muffled now by a wall of bent and torn and crumpled metal, and she hops down through the hole that her destruction’s left behind, landing lightly on her feet in a dimly lit basement room.

It’s a storage room, looks like. Just a bunch of boxes everywhere, a few spare chairs and tables stacked off to one side.

“Okay,” she breathes. _“That_ just fucking happened, I guess.”

A talking raccoon. A talking raccoon wearing clothes. That last bit of whiskey sitting on Claire’s coffee table is sounding more and more tempting right about now. Jess takes a deep breath and raspberries it through her lips, leans back and cracks her shoulders now that she’s got the space for it, and cracks her neck for good measure, too.

She looks at the door directly ahead of her and then the one to her right.

“If I was a stupidly powerful God of Thunder willingly placed under arrest after the end of the world, where would I be?”

Above, the muffled cursing of the raccoon starts to fade, and she hears it scurrying through the vents in the general direction of _forward._ Well, she thinks, that makes the decision a little easier, at least.

She turns right, carefully and quietly turning the doorknob and inching the door open so she can peer inside.

The next room is much bigger. It’s got to be the size of Jessica’s entire apartment, sleek and modern and very _Tony Stark,_ if Jess is right from what very little she knows about the guy. Floor-to-ceiling glass walls separate the space from the rooms further ahead. It’s big enough to hold a massive conference table fit to seat twenty or so people, _plus_ an entire kitchen to the right, and the rooms on the other side of the glass seem to be made for… some kind of communication, she figures, what with the big beeping consoles and flat screens embedded into the walls. Hell if she knows.

And at the exact moment that she steps into the room and quietly shuts the door behind her, someone comes sprinting into the room from a door to the right.

Jess tenses up, prepped for a fight — _especially_ when she sees that the newcomer is decked out in full combat gear and lugging around a semi-automatic — but the agent stops in his tracks, looking just as stunned to see her as she is to see him.

The agent asks, “Jess?”

“Uh—”

“Oh, thank _God,”_ the agent breathes, slumping with relief. “It’s me. It’s Claire.”

Jess steps back, staring slack jawed as her brain struggles to catch up with a six-foot-tall armed agent and his deep baritone voice saying, without a hint of irony, that he’s a five-foot-something female nurse from Hell’s Kitchen. Then she shakes her head, remembering that’s not actually the craziest thing she’s seen today.

“Right,” she says, dropping out of her defensive stance. “Magic.” She’s never gonna get used to that. Hopefully she never has to. “Loki made you…” she trails off, gesturing from Claire’s head to her boots and back again, “… like that?”

“Yeah,” the agent says, clenching his — her — jaw in obvious annoyance. Then she tilts the agents head to gesture toward the door on the opposite end of the conference room. “Come on. We don’t have a whole lot of time.”

“No shit,” Jess agrees, following her toward the door. “You would _not_ believe the time I’ve had.”

“Yeah,” Claire says, and they pick up the pace as voices start sounding from where she’d just come, somewhere behind the door. “Same.”

“Had to climb through the damn vents and almost got in a fight with a talking raccoon.”

Claire doesn’t even sound fazed. “Yeah,” she says, “Loki knocked out the Secretary of State and then we almost got shot by the Black Widow.”

Jess blinks. She’s not sure whether to be pissed off that she missed Ross getting sucker punched unconscious or to be relieved she hasn’t actually run into an Avenger yet. She and Claire move on to the next room — a small one without much in it except for a few tables pushed against one wall and some expensive looking decorations — and they hurry across it to the next door.

Footsteps start pounding through the conference room they’ve just left.

Agents are closing in on them. Shit.

Jess turns, looking around a little frantically until she finds something suitable, and with a grunt of effort she rips a metal leg off of one of the tables. It’s thick enough and sturdy enough that it should do, she thinks, and she bends it around the doorknob and pounds the other end of it into the wall.

It’s not pretty, but it should work.

Someone grabs the door from the other side and pulls, but the makeshift lock holds steady. The commotion of voices in the other room hikes up in volume.

“Room 011,” the agent — no, Claire — says, moving to the next door and trying to open it, but it doesn’t budge. “This should be it.”

“Move,” Jess says, shoving past her. The door is bigger than most of the others have been, with a heavy latch instead of a knob, but Jess plants her foot on the wall beside it and grits her teeth and _pulls_ until some mechanism inside the door snaps, and it sways open with a creak.

“Okay,” Claire says. “Awesome, let’s—”

She’s cut off as someone tries the door behind them again, and this time, the metal table leg gives a scream of protest and snaps clean in half. The door swings open easily, and just as Claire makes it through to the next room and Jess scrambles to follow behind her, she looks over her shoulder and—

— and sees none other than _Captain America_ stepping through the open doorway.

“Oh, _fuck_ me.”

Everyone freezes for a moment. Claire, Jess, the handful of agents gathered behind Captain America, and of course Mr. Fourth-of-July himself. The agents look like they’re itching to charge at her, but Captain America’s outstretched arm is enough to make them hesitate.

And the first stupid thought that crosses Jess’ brain is _well, good thing Loki didn’t go with that disguise, he would have been way off,_ because this Captain America is lacking the bigass shield and the star-spangled suit and the clean shaven boy scout look, staring between her and The Agent Formerly Known As Claire Temple with his brows creased in obvious apprehension.

The second thought she has, when the panicked fog dissipates from her brain, is:

_“Shit.”_

“Come on!” Claire yells at her, and they scramble through the door.

“Wait—!”

They slam the door behind them, cutting off Captain America’s shout, and Jess grabs the first thing she sees within arm’s reach — some kind of filing cabinet — and wrenches it away from the wall, tipping it over until it crashes to the floor and blocks the doorway. Then she shoves all of her weight against it and digs her heels into the floor. Nothing she can lift is going to be enough to stop Captain America and his stupid ridiculous supersoldier strength, or at least she can’t _assume_ it will be, but it might be able to buy them a few seconds if she holds it in place with everything she’s got. Maybe.

Something shoves against the door from the other side. One of the agents, probably, since it barely budges.

Then the next hit is _several_ times harder, and the filing cabinet and Jess’ shoes both skid a few inches back on the tile.

 _“Fuck,_ he’s strong.”

A chaotic mess of voices hikes up from the other side of the door, the agents all shouting over each other and their voices too muffled to make out individual words. It sounds like Captain America’s arguing with them, or they’re arguing with him, but it’s hard to tell.

There’s a sound from behind her then, an intake of breath that doesn’t sound like Claire’s _or_ the random agent she’s been disguised as, and Jessica’s heart sinks even as she tenses her arms against the filing cabinet.

Shit.

They’re not alone in here.

 

* * *

 

Claire, upon stepping into Room 011, goes through a few distinct phases in rapid succession.

The first is still the tail end of heart-pumping adrenaline and fear, because _actual Captain America_ and a bunch of faceless agents are trying to get to her and they absolutely see her as a threat, and the only thing standing between them and her is about a hundred pounds of leather-clad superstrength that may or may not be enough to keep him at bay.

The second is just the littlest touch of relief, because holy shit, she set out to find where Loki was heading and she _actually found him._ The false image of Secretary Ross — and it’s definitely a false image, given the lack of a bruised lump on his head and the fact that he doesn’t look like he’s just crawled out of a storage closet — is standing on the other end of this room. And although he’d been staring warily at the occupants of a clear-walled containment cell to their left, his eyes snapped to Claire and Jessica as soon as hey came barreling in the door like two bulls in a high tech china shop.

The third is confusion, because — who the hell is that in the containment cell? It takes her a second to recognize Bruce Banner, but the other guy, is that…?

Then the fourth comes so quickly and so viscerally that she stops giving a shit about the containment cell, and about Captain America currently trying to bust through the door behind them, and about anybody else that might be closing in on their location any goddamn second now.

“You. _Asshole!”_

It’s a little less satisfying that it comes out in someone else’s voice, but she stomps forward and closes the distance between herself and not-Secretary-Ross in a few quick long strides, and wastes absolutely no time in dealing a swift punch to his jaw with every ounce of strength she has in her.

“What — the _hell,”_ Loki sputters, staggering back a step with wide eyes, “was that for?”

“For leaving me behind to deal with a goddamn _Avenger,_ that’s what that was for!” Claire shouts, shoving him in the chest. He doesn’t stumble back this time; it’s like hitting a steel wall. “You _asshole!”_

“You’re still in one piece, are you not?”

“Yeah, no thanks to—”

 _“Guys,”_ Jess shouts, and the two of them turn to find her still crouched against the filing cabinet with her arms tensed and her face tinged red. “Argue _later._ Plan _now.”_

Claire huffs, running a hand over her face. “Fine. _Fine._ Let’s just…” she trails off, glancing into the containment cell, where Bruce Banner and Thor — because yeah, that must be Thor, she realizes, though he looks way different than she ever remembers seeing him in interviews and magazine covers — are both sitting on a bench and staring with mild interest at everything that’s happening outside their cell. “Let’s get them out of here and maybe do this somewhere else, yeah?”

Loki nods, looking back toward the cell.

He hesitates, though, suddenly looking… different. Not like himself, like someone smaller. It’s a look that would seem slightly out of place on Loki’s actual face and is downright jarring on the face of Secretary Ross.

“Hey,” Claire says, frowning. “You can get the cell open, right?”

He must be able to, she thinks. If he can shapeshift and cast illusions and teleport and come back from the _goddamn_ dead, how hard can a lock be? Right?

“I… can,” he admits.

“Uh, Ross?” Bruce Banner asks, quiet and timid, his brow creased as he looks from Loki to Claire and back to Loki. “What, uh… Do you want to tell us what’s going on? Is it something to do with…” he points up and twirls his finger in a vague circle, indicating the red lights still flashing intermittently from the ceiling, “… the alarms?”

“There’s a threat,” Thor speaks up, his voice lower and scratchier than Claire had expected. He’s sitting with his forearms across his knees, hands together. His eyes, a mismatched blue and brown, are fixed squarely and coldly on the brother that he doesn’t, evidently, know is his brother. “We’re only meant to be hidden away in this cell until our services are needed. Is that right?”

Secretary Ross sets his jaw, the frightened look on his face hardening into one of anger. “And what, exactly, are you _doing_ in this cell anyway?”

“What? Ross, _you_ wanted us here,” Banner says. “We’ve been cooperating. Seriously, what else do you want from us?”

Loki, his eyes unwavering from Thor, says with barely controlled anger simmering in his voice, “Bruce, I mean no offense, but stay out of this.”

“No, Bruce is right,” Thor argues. “You ordered us here.”

“And you _listened?”_

“What choice did I have? What choice did _either_ of us have?”

“Any choice!” Loki shouts. “Any choice other than submitting and rolling over and playing dead—”

Banner throws a hand in the air. “Why would you—?”

 _“Everyone_ is dead,” Thor cuts Banner off, his voice lower but somehow packed with twice the fury and twice the misery that Claire’s heard from any of the others. He sounds like speaking any louder might actually break him, and he sounds like he knows it. “Half the Universe has just been obliterated at the hands of a madman because _I wasn’t fast enough to kill him,_ so _forgive_ me if I was hesitant to incite more violence for some misguided show of _tenacity—”_

Loki, apparently, has no such problems with raising his voice. Or Ross’ voice, at any rate. “Oh, so you’re putting all of this on _your_ shoulders now? Wallowing in self pity when it wasn’t even _your_ actions that—!”

“HEY!” Jess shouts over both of them. “Any _fucking_ day now, assholes!”

The door behind her gives an ominous groan and the voices grow clearer and louder; the door has actually opened a few inches, and Loki spares it a quick glance, like he’d almost forgotten it was there at all in the heat of his argument with his brother.

“Right,” Loki says, rolling his eyes. Then he waves a hand, and the cacophonous shouts and the banging and screeching of metal suddenly fade into silence. “There. That should buy us a few minutes, at least.”

Jess balks, slamming her back and elbows into the filing cabinet until the door shuts again. “You could have done that this _whole time?!”_

“What the hell did you do?” Claire asks.

Loki lowers his voice so that only she can hear. “An illusion. They’ll think I’ve magically moved the door to the other side of the room.”

“What happens when they figure it out?”

“Like I said.” He shrugs. “A few minutes.”

His gaze returns to the cell. That tiny window of distraction, it seems, was enough to expel all the fiery anger out of him like air from a popped balloon. His shoulders slump. He works his jaw for a moment, staring at Thor. The out-of-place frightened look is back.

Then he takes a fortifying breath and steps toward the cell.

“Not…” he starts to say, closes his eyes, and admits, “Not _everyone_ is dead.”

Thor shoots a glance toward the door, then looks at Ross again. _“Half_ of everyone.”

Loki nods. Then he takes another breath, working his tongue between his teeth, and he gives a nervous laugh and looks up at the ceiling. “Well. Suppose the cell is good for one thing, at least, isn’t it?”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Thor asks.

It seems some of Loki’s nervousness has bled over to him, though. His eyes are still narrowed in suspicion, but there’s a concerned edge to the set of his brows and the way he fidgets with his hands. And it’s funny, Claire thinks, how _human_ he looks, though that at least doesn’t come as much of a shock given what she’s seen of Loki in the last twenty-four hours. They’re both a little startlingly human at times.

 _Human,_ she supposes, has become more of an adjective lately than a label for a species, maybe. A term to be used more loosely than she once thought.

“I’m going to show you something,” Loki says. “And we’re running quite short on time, but I’d rather do it while you’re still…” he hesitates and gestures with a nod at the cell, “… in there.”

Thor says nothing to that. He just watches Secretary Ross with wary eyes.

And Claire expects Loki to make the transformation slow and dramatic. She expects him to reveal the illusion one piece at a time, a green shimmer cascading from the top of his head down to his feet.

Instead it’s like his magic had been held in place with a rubber band that’s just — snapped. It’s almost instant, a rush of light that tingles in the corners of her eyes and wrenches her back to her normal height without warning, sudden enough that she drops the weapon she’d been holding to let it clatter to the floor.

She touches her stomach, her sides, her face, breathing a sigh of relief at the return of everything back to how it’d been. And when she looks up, she finds Loki standing beside her looking…

Oh. Shit.

He looks _awful._

“What the hell?” she says aloud without thinking.

Even when she’d last seen him, no more than an hour ago, he hadn’t looked like this. He’d been healing, the bruising had mostly faded from around his throat, he’d gained back some of the color in his skin so he no longer looked like a walking ghost. He’d even magicked his clothes clean and fixed the slice Claire had made through the collar of his shirt.

But all of that, every last bit of it, has returned now. It takes Claire a second to realize why.

It was an illusion. Holy shit, _all_ of it was an illusion. All of his healing, or at least most of it, was an illusion to make himself look better, to make himself look more intimidating or more in control of the situation or _something._ And that means he’s been doing all of this, the fighting and the magic casting and everything, with a half-broken neck and with one foot in his grave and with some segment of his attention constantly devoted to _hiding_ all of that.

He’s staring straight ahead, and Claire’s still close enough that she can see him trembling.

Thor, on the other hand, has frozen stock still.

“Loki,” Banner says, sounding like he’s just been punched in the stomach. “You’re…?”

Loki’s left eye still has that popped blood vessel in it, and _both_ eyes are shining with tears that might be due to the nervousness but, Claire thinks, are most likely due to the crushed windpipe that’s _still goddamn crushed._

God, why hadn’t he waited? He could have stayed on her couch for another day. That would have been fine. He could have healed up more before they did something as batshit insane as this.

In response to Banner’s question, Loki nods once.

Finally, in one fluid movement, Thor stands. His fists are clenched at his sides, his brows knit together as he stares at his brother, and when he speaks, his voice is as low as a growl, a resonant sound that vibrates like — and Claire hates that this is the only thing she can think of, but it’s the truth — like distant thunder.

“Is this a trick?”

Loki gulps. His voice is so quiet and rasping that it makes Claire wince. “No more tricks, remember?”

Something shifts in the air.

It’s not like Loki’s magic. It’s not like that strange hum of energy that made her hair stand on end back at the apartment. Instead she feels it from somewhere deep in her chest all the way down to the tips of her toes. It’s something that rumbles through the floor, buzzes through the air, sends a shudder through her spine.

Thor takes a step toward the front of the cell, then another, and another.

And given the look on his face, Claire thinks she understands why Loki decided to drop the illusion _before_ opening the cell up. What was that she’d thought about Thor just a few seconds ago? That he looked almost human? Because _Christ,_ that effect is entirely lost now. The man standing in that cell with his human-looking mismatched eyes and his human-looking cropped hair and his human-looking plain old hoodie is—

He is _anything_ but human.

“You—” Thor starts to say, then tightens his jaw when his voice catches.

Bluish light shines from his one blue eye.

Then a single spark flies from the fingertips of his left hand, and an arc of white-blue lightning zaps up his right forearm. The low rumbling from the floor amps up in a crescendo, and Loki takes a hesitant step back. He gulps, hands up as if to placate Thor somehow.

“Thor…”

There’s the deafening _cra-cra-BANG_ of lightning that crashes through the room, and though every single one of them flinches at the sound, it doesn’t hit any of them. Instead it zaps through the other end of the room, where a metal control panel had been set into the wall. The panel _pops_ and sizzles and sparks, and by the time the lightning fades, the entire thing is reduced to a scorched and smoking hole in the wall.

And the cell wall opens with an anticlimactic _ting._

 _Jesus,_ Claire thinks.

He’d never been trapped in the cell at all, had he?

“Thor— wait— I— I didn’t—” Loki stammers, already backpedaling with wide eyes.

Claire doesn’t blame him. There’s even a moment, one insane moment, in which she’s tempted to step in between them as Thor stalks out of the cell and toward his brother with lightning still arcing and popping along his arms and his one blue eye still glowing impossibly bright white. But it’s just a moment, and that moment of brief insanity quickly yields to self-preservation, for better or for worse.

She backs up a step.

“Uh, Thor? Buddy?” Banner asks, cautiously stepping out of the cell behind him, but he might as well not have spoken at all.

 _“Hey,”_ Jess speaks up from by the door, firm despite the twinge of fear in her voice.

Thor ignores her, too. Even as that bright light fades from his eye, static continues to crackle through the room, tense and waiting like the seconds before a lightning strike. He grabs Loki roughly by the shoulder, like he expects him to disappear at any moment, like he’s holding him down to prevent a last minute escape. With his other hand he grabs Loki by the jaw so that he can get a better look at the damage to his throat beneath, but Loki lets out a strangled sound of pain as soon as Thor moves him a single inch.

At that sound, Thor goes still, and his eyes scan over Loki from head to toe.

“I’m—” Loki struggles to speak. “I didn’t—”

“Loki,” Thor says, voice heavy as he releases Loki’s face but keeps a grip on his shoulder. He shakes his head, eyeing his brother down like he barely recognizes him. “What the _hell_ were you—”

“No,” Loki insists, returning Thor’s anger with surprising ferocity given how close he looks to collapsing. _“Don’t.”_

“Loki—”

“I _had_ to. He was _killing you—”_

“And he killed you instead,” Thor cuts him off, low and choked and still so, so angry. “You _died._ I saw it, every awful second of it, and I—” His voice catches again, but he determinedly presses on. “You were dead. You were really dead. It was _real_ this time, wasn’t it?”

Loki gulps, sets his jaw, and offers a stilted little nod. “It was.”

“And you came back,” Thor says. “You came back anyway.”

“I—” Loki starts to say, but his voice fails him again.

And it seems, with that, whatever fight was left in Loki drains out of him. He hesitates for a moment, staring teary-eyed and unmoving at his brother, and he bites down on the inside of his cheek. One of the tears escapes and trails down his cheek, but he doesn’t seem to notice it.

“I’m sorry it’s just me,” Loki rasps, and his lips twitch in a sad approximation of a smile. “I tried to— to find some of the others, but—”

Thor doesn’t let him finish.

He pulls his brother toward him, wrapping one arm around his shoulders and winding the other tight around his ribs. Loki goes rigid at first, but there’s barely half a second before he sinks into the embrace, and barely another second after that before he crumbles entirely, his arms gripping like a vice around his brother’s torso and his fists white-knuckled on the back of Thor’s hoodie.

Thor murmurs, “You’re an idiot.”

“Yeah,” Loki croaks, his voice muffled by Thor’s shoulder. “You, um… You got a new eye.”

“Mm-hmm.” Thor nods as he tightens his hold and hunches over and buries his face in his brother’s shoulder, too. “I’m sorry I said you were the worst.”

Loki’s shoulders shake with a silent laugh, but he says nothing else — and if Claire hears him sniffle a bit, well, it’s not like _she’s_ gonna go around telling anyone about it. He squeezes tighter, raises one hand to the back of Thor’s head and keeps it there.

Quietly, carefully, Bruce Banner inches around them. He reaches out and gives Thor’s upper arm a little squeeze and a pat, and then he turns his attention to Claire, directing one tentative glance over her shoulder at Jess.

“I, uh,” he says, and clears his throat. “Hi. I’m Bruce.”

“Yeah. Claire.”

Bruce looks toward Jess. “And you’re…?”

 _“Very fucking exhausted_ is what I am,” she spits, still attemping to hold the filing cabinet in place.

Claire sighs. “That’s Jess.”

“Oh. Uh, you guys… friends of Loki’s? I guess?”

“Sure,” she sighs, because why not. “I guess, yeah.”

“And you guys didn’t… actually kill Ross, did you?”

He says it with a timid little smile, like he hates that he even has to ask. And there’s something oddly disarming about him, something about the reserved way he speaks or how small he looks standing beside Thor and Loki — shit, he’s at eye level with _Claire_ — so that she doesn’t second guess the merits of giving him a straightforward answer.

“No,” she says. “He’s knocked out in the front lobby storage closet.”

“Is that seriously your biggest question?” Jess shouts, incredulous, and when Claire turns she sees that the pounding from the other side of the door has picked back up. “Not ‘how did you guys get in here’ or ‘what are you doing breaking and entering with Public Enemy Number One’ or, I dunno, _‘what the hell are we gonna do when Captain goddamn America busts through this door?’”_

“Oh,” Bruce says, like he’s completely forgotten about that. “Yeah, no, Steve’s fine. He’ll be cool about…” he gestures vaguely around them, “… all this.”

“Even…?” Claire asks, raising her eyebrows pointedly at Loki, who has yet to extricate himself from his brother’s arms.

“Especially him, actually,” Bruce replies with a half-smile. He idly taps his hands together, one hand in a loose fist. “Good news has been… kinda scarce these last few days.” He shrugs, like that alone settles it.

Claire narrows her eyes, frowning, and she looks up at Loki again. She hadn’t been too worried about how well he would handle himself after they found his brother, but now that she’s seen how worse for wear he _actually_ is—

“You’re sure?” she asks.

“Oh, yeah, yeah.” Bruce nods, waves a hand. “The biggest obstacle is gonna be Ross, whenever he wakes up. Maybe a few of his agents. But, uh…” He glances over his shoulder at Thor and Loki, then turns back and offers Claire a sheepish smile. “Something tells me he’s not gonna get much of a say in it.”

“Okay,” Jess grits out, and the next _bang_ on the door sends her shoes skidding a few inches on the floor. “Great. I’m gonna—” She cuts off with a groan and a pissed off roll of her eyes when the door gets shoved again, and then she twists at the waist and shouts over the discordant voices on the other side: “Hey, ASSHOLES. Relax with the battering ram for shit’s sake! We’re opening the door!”

Bruce winces, hurrying toward Jess and beckoning for Claire to follow him.

“Let’s, uh, give those guys a minute,” he says to Claire with a nod back toward Thor and Loki, who have finally begun to pull apart and have started talking lowly amongst themselves, like none of this puny human business means a single bit to either of them. Then he calls out toward the door, “Steve?”

The agents’ voices instantly quiet down, and a single voice replies, “Bruce? Are you—?”

“Yeah, we’re okay, we just, uh… Hang on,” he says, and he gives Jess a look, half apologetic and half a pointed head tilt that says, _Can you move that big heavy filing cabinet you knocked over, ma’am, please and thank you?_

Jess raises an eyebrow at him, arms still tensed against it. She asks, “You sure those asshole agents aren’t gonna shoot first and ask questions later?”

Bruce actually snorts. “Uh, yeah, no. Not if I’m here. They know that bullets don’t exactly, uh… _work_ on me. Or around me.”

And _that’s_ funny, Claire thinks. She’s never heard anyone admit they’re bulletproof in quite that tone, like it’s not so much a superpower as it is a mildly embarrassing illness.

“You’re really the big green guy?” Jess asks, looking him over from head to toe and back, and she raises her eyebrows as she lets go of the filing cabinet and straightens up to her full height, shaking out her arms. “Thought you’d be bigger.”

“Yeah, I get that a lot.”

Jess crouches down to lift the cabinet up and out of the way. “If I get shot,” she says, wriggling her fingers underneath it, “I’m gonna be real goddamn pissed off.”

“You won’t get shot,” Bruce tells her again. “Really. Most of the people here are actually pretty nice. You know, when you’re not breaking and entering and tripping alarms all over the place.”

“Whatever,” Jess huffs.

She lifts up the cabinet with a screech of metal against the tile, and it falls over onto its side with a _CLANG,_ a few feet over and well out of the way of the door. Bruce steps around both Claire and Jess so that he’ll be the first thing Captain America and the agents see, and he takes a breath and claps his hands together.

“So,” he says. “You guys ready to meet the rest of the team?”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ~ fin ~
> 
> i wanted it to be up to you guys whether claire and jess (and roberto, but i think they'd be like "dude you're like 18 please go home for the love of god") decide to stick with the avengers and help with Reverse The Snap plans, or if they decide the avengers have that covered and they'll look out for the little guys and keep new york from falling apart in the meantime. reader's choice!
> 
> no promises about sequels or anything (i'm still working on TUA fic and my OHTMB sequel so ya girl is busy af), but there's always the possibility of little vignettes and/or an epilogue in the future
> 
> (i will say though, one scene that would definitely occur after this: rocket breaks through the vents into room 011 all pissed off and ready to LIGHT JESS UP, sees loki and thor, goes "huh. that the dead brother?" and bruce goes "that's the dead brother, yeah" and they all leave thor and loki alone for a bit while the others make introductions and discuss plans and stuff)
> 
> (also i give it about two hours before someone goes "SHIT WE FORGOT ABOUT ROSS" because they've totally forgotten about ross)

**Author's Note:**

> as always, feel free to come hang out on [tumblr](http://iguessyouregonnamissthepantyraid.tumblr.com)


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